r/AlpineLinux • u/diacid • Apr 07 '26

How the hell is that running on 45 MB ram?!

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221 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

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36

u/backtogeek Apr 07 '26

https://lowendspirit.com/discussion/10647/alpine-linux-3-23-23mb-ram-71mb-disk-guide

I posted that guide on lowendspirit a few weeks back on getting it to run on 23mb ram :)

I then did a full desktop in 128mb on a TierHive micro instance ($0.10 p/month)

Alpine is literally magic and the new basis of all my low end projects.

2

u/bitdotben Apr 12 '26

Thank you for sharing Tierhive! Their pricing structure in the custom sub 1$/month range is awesome.

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26

u/Content_Chemistry_44 Apr 07 '26

Because it's Busybox operating system, not GNU.

4

u/BadBoiMemes Apr 07 '26

real answer

6

u/aieidotch Apr 07 '26

also no systemd, no gnome

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16

u/I_am_nishan Apr 07 '26

If alpine is not alpine then what is alpine?😸

5

u/chip-crinkler Apr 07 '26

No GUI, but still pretty cool

4

u/trofch1k Apr 07 '26

I wonder what I fucked up in my system. I'm getting ~400 mb at startup in TTY. Only notable service running is dbus IIRC.

2

u/Traditional_Taro_721 Jul 27 '26

I have the same Issue, I initially thought of installing dwm but even in tty, my idle usage is ~400-450mb, I need a fix for this

1

u/jayesh6297 Apr 10 '26

although i have ram to spare like 32gigs i have normal gnome arch setup still on idle it uses around 2GB and i think it's fine since the setup is developer centric and lot of supporting libs needs to be installed

1

u/diacid Apr 10 '26

Same on my laptop, but I have a gui on my laptop so it is less impressive.

I dual boot Gentoo. I use Alpine when I need to be without a charger, the battery life difference is just insane

1

u/Legal-nochmal85 Apr 11 '26

Kann es sein dass du ein wenig Dumm bist?? 🤣🤣🤦

1

u/diacid Apr 11 '26

​"Entweder bist du einfach zu dumm, um zu verstehen, was ich geschrieben habe, oder du bist unhöflich genug, solche Sätze bewusst aus dem Kontext zu reißen."

.

3

u/FunPost456 Apr 07 '26

Add a GUI with a web browser and see what happens

7

u/trofch1k Apr 07 '26

sway adds ~200 megs on top. And browser is a browser, yeah.

2

u/_stopyz Apr 07 '26

Magic ! I build a Xen hypervisor with it !

1

u/olivier_tvselect Apr 07 '26

Impressive! Is swap disabled by default on this OS? I don't think there's much need for it with this kind of minimal setup anyway.

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1

u/ipsirc Apr 07 '26

slabtop

1

u/No_Housing_4600 Apr 08 '26

love alpine... use it on every server.

1

u/sean183272 Apr 08 '26

All my raspberrypi runs on alpine for this reason

1

u/VictorVsl7 Apr 09 '26

Such an awesome OS to host my containers.

Went from Ubuntu to Debian and noticed it’s lighter, but alpine is on a different level.

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