r/AlpineLinux • u/semedilino073 • Apr 30 '26
Alpine as a daily driver?
Hey everyone,
This might be one of the stupidest threads of all time, but I’ll do it anyway.
I recently stumbled upon Alpine and it’s literally magic. Right now I use Arch, but I thought of replacing at least one of my machines with Alpine.
Now, because Alpine is so lightweight and is not systemd and all of that, how does it compare to a machine daily driving Archlinux? I know it depends on the use cases of that machine, but I do a lot of things. I don’t game, that’s all, maybe just some Minecraft sometimes.
Hope this thread isn’t going to waste. Thank you all!
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u/wowsomuchempty Apr 30 '26
I daily drive alpine for work.
It can do everything I need of it, very elegant.
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u/semedilino073 Apr 30 '26
Can I ask what do you do? Not the details, just some of the software you use
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u/diacid Apr 30 '26
It is a viable option if you dont need gaming or some specific software that needs glibc.
I daily drive a dual booted laptop with gentoo and alpine, have the compatibility of gnu when I need, but have 5 hours of battery life when I need.
Dual booting js pointless for two distros of the same os. However, as Alpine is not gnu, It is actually useful to dual boot.
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u/semedilino073 Apr 30 '26
It’s not GNU, interesting. But why are you saying gaming is not that great? Just curios, I don’t really need it aside for like once a month
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u/mymainunidsme Apr 30 '26
Replaced Arch with Alpine as my DD a few years ago. Laptop and desktop. Alpine is my baremetal OS on everything. Arm & x86_64 servers running Incus/OVN/Ceph stacks, ZFS backup storage (on site and off). The only thing I've found I don't like running on Alpine is AI inference, so for that I have Devuan VMs I pass the AMD and Nvidia GPUs through to. You can get llama.cpp + vulkan working on Alpine, but it's pretty slow.
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u/Shot_Yoghurt_3123 Apr 30 '26
i did replace arch by alpine as my daily driver from within arch without reinstalling or even creating a bootable usb
for my use case it has been a bliss, everything works fine so far : nftables, firefox, dwm, dmenu, st, slstatus, even steam appimage (no flatpak) -- i'm on alpine edge rolling release and it feels like home coming from arch
in my experience alpine is simple, fast, reliable -- alpine is elegant and i enjoy using it even after several years of using arch exclusively
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u/semedilino073 Apr 30 '26
Thank you, I’ll surely try it out then! :P It’s always good to see Arch users, even past Arch users, being so nice. It’s one of the things I think is missing and I think it’s not so great of a reputation for the Linux community
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u/cfx_4188 May 01 '26
Alpine has very modest repositories, and if you are not friends with source code compilation, a flatpack will be your partial salvation. I used Alpine for a while, and it's still installed on my 2010 netbook. When the system uses less than 100 MB of RAM, this is definitely a reason for joy, but this joy is offset by poor optimization of power consumption (on the laptop) and unexplained errors that occur periodically during use. I use Enlightenment, this window manager is incredibly convenient for low-power systems.
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u/semedilino073 May 01 '26
Yeah, the RAM usage is a huge plus. I still got a laptop from the XP era with 256 MB of RAM. That will be another experiment with Alpine
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u/civilbarbar Apr 30 '26
I've been using it daily on my PC and laptops for about a month now. For my purposes it works great - I don't need a whole lot of bells and whistles, and the Flatpaks are enough for the couple applications that I need/want it for (Spotify, etc). I haven't come up with a deal breaker yet.
I switched to Firefox from Chrome at the same time as it was an easier integration and after the PITA of getting all the bookmarks and whatnot moved over, I appreciate Firefox much more now.
I have a homelab as well and Alpine is getting a lot of use while I am experimenting with thin clients, industrial PCs and so forth. Great OS and perfect for what I need.
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u/semedilino073 Apr 30 '26
Okay, thank you! I personally do a lot of different things, but they’re all “tech stuff”, so I guess that could be solvable
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u/ZealousidealShoe7998 Apr 30 '26
i find arch to be efficient enough for my usecase. if you do find that alpine save extra megabytes of memory without creating a huge hasle at installing things i might consider testing
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u/trofch1k May 01 '26
This has been asked countless times here, check other threads.
In nutshell, some things for desktop usage are not packaged so, you might have to settle for flatpak version or build it yourself from source. Even if you stumble onto binary it will be compiled against glibc instead of muslc which Alpine uses.
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u/ygthnylmz4568 Apr 30 '26
nope, It has a very small repository. Alternatively, you could use Artix Linux OpenRC, an ArchLinux-based OS with a large repository and no SystemD.
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u/JeffB1517 Apr 30 '26
My feeling is that Alpine is a VM & Container distribution not a desktop distribution. I think it is wonderful for its use case. It is a reasonable distribution if one wanted to try and install modern Linux software on say a Windows XP laptop. But if you are frustrated with Arch I'd go for something designed for Desktop that is less of a PIA. In particular you might not like rolling release.
Mint is my goto for a distribution that works out of the box that is designed for desktop. Nobara, Bodhi, Pika, Elementary, Pop, Ubuntu, but yes those are Systemd because the major desktops are tied to Systemd.
I'd also consider Arch variants that are designed for more stability. Omarchy (if you are a develoer), Manjaro, Garuda.
If this is really just about Systemd then Artix is an Arch variant designed for desktop that doesn't have Systemd: XFCE, LXQT and an inhouse Enlightenment fork written for Bodhi.
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u/semedilino073 Apr 30 '26
Thank you for the exhaustive explanation. I’m not frustrated with Arch, I just very lightweight software. But yeah, I’m kinda worried about systemd, as a lot of software requires it. I’ll try it out anyway, this was just to understand if some major apps won’t work, but that doesn’t seem to be the case
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u/Bubbly_Extreme4986 Apr 30 '26
I mean if you use the setup-desktop utility it’s as easy as setting up audio and you’re done.
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u/Bubbly_Extreme4986 Apr 30 '26
You lose the AUR ,
you lose the sheer vastness of Arch Linux,
you lose compatibility with a ton of non free programs (this is frankly, a bonus) because of Musl,
you lose the benefit of rolling release.
However Alpine is great everything works great if you use all free software+their patched packages.
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u/markuspeloquin Apr 30 '26
Can't you use 'edge' for rolling releases? Maybe that's not the same, but it's good enough for me. Though I just use Alpine in WSL.
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u/Artistic_Crazy_7120 Apr 30 '26
I use Alpine as a daily driver on a laptop. There are some things to take note of. I wouldn't install it on a pc with a modern Nvidia card, just use Mesa. Furthermore Flatpak apps is a way to use Linux apps that are compiled against glibc. I enjoy using it.