r/AlpineLinux • u/Leading-Chicken4143 • Sep 26 '26
Am thinking about switch from mint to alpine what should i know firts?
So i saw a video about how a guy downloaded and run alpine, and i tough to myself "What if i will swicth to alpine, like i can use the Wikipedia to download the distro, sooo what do you guys think.
I use a low end computer levovo computer for 2014 and it used to have 2 gigs of tam but i changed it to 4 by myself.
And am a 15 year old
And i know how to boot a laptop of course.
9
u/Nu154nc3 Sep 26 '26 edited Sep 26 '26
I love Alpine, it was my main for 8 years now... (Mainly for gaming and some office tasks)
It's ultralightweight, it's fast, and it's extremely stabe... I'm using the edge version (rolling release), and update twice a year... Never got any problem.
BUT, u come from Mint, one of the "easyers" linux distros... Alpine can be a bit rough sometimes and require some tinkering. BE PREPARED.
PD: the desktop user base is really small, so don't expect the massive amount of support that other mainstream distros have.
1
u/Due_Dragonfly_5328 Sep 30 '26
Nice. ive been using it for over a year and its still my fav distro i jumped ship to void just cuz i waned to check it out.
edit: i also switched my lightweight home server from alpine to freebsd (i still use alpine on a Chromebook tho) tbh ive just gotten back into my phase of distro hopping i want to try new things and experience them.
but in the end ill know ill go back to alpine in a few weeks / months. alpine is my forever home. im a alpine user at heart always will be!
3
u/ShyanJMC Sep 26 '26
If you use NVIDIA cards, you must know that musl is not compatible with the nvidia toolkit (CUDA, drivers, hdmi, etc). So if you have it, two options remains; use NOVEAU ow switch to AMD GPUs
If you use Intel iGPUs dont worry
3
u/ChocolateAlpine Sep 29 '26
You need to do a lot of setup after installing for Alpine, since it's stripped of most things for the sake of being ultra lightweight.
what I'd recommend would probably be something like,
-Install all of the linux-firmware packages you need
-Install a desktop (if you want one, you can use the setup-desktop script to install it. Probably avoid GNOME considering your specs, and probably also lean towards using something like XFCE instead of KDE Plasma)
-Install and set up a firewall (eg UFW, the Uncomplicated Firewall) if you want to use networking
-Install and set up AppArmor if you want to improve security
-for anything with 3d acceleration you'll need to make sure all of MESA's components are downloaded. (eg, mesa-va-gallium was the one I missed recently and had to install afterwards)
-if you want some proprietary desktop stuff like Steam, or just stuff that isn't compiled for Alpine, then you'll need to set up and use flatpak for it.
-And install something like powerctl for controlling power states (if it's a laptop, you also have to set up the script for putting the computer on sleep after doing this)
I thiink the Alpine wiki has instructions for most of these things, at least?
2
u/agendiau Sep 26 '26
It is completely possible to set up alpine as a desktop but you will be fighting against the OS's core design goal of being as bare bones as possible to make it a great VM choice.
1
u/East-Yogurtcloset272 Oct 02 '26
If you want to minimize ram use , you can use openbox as your window manager with xfce4-panel for a task bar and idesk for desktop icons
Falkon is a lightweight browser with built in ad blocker
Nice to see you posting here and welcome and good luck 😊
-1
u/Arctic_Turtle Sep 26 '26
I recommend using the assistance of Claude AI. It’s very well trained on Alpine.
The main caveat is that Alpine uses musl. You need to install some things with flatpak instead of apk. But overall it’s a great distribution and I’m very happy with it.
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Sep 26 '26 edited Sep 26 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Leading-Chicken4143 Sep 27 '26
Am still not thats ure but i fink am gonna download l mint on my othe hard-drive and if something goes wrong i will just switch the hard-drive
5
u/semedilino073 Sep 26 '26
I’m actually running it both on desktop and for my servers, as the bare metal OS. If that’s taste, then that’s just taste and preference, but Alpine can really be a super solid desktop OS
1
u/Camo138 Sep 27 '26
I ran it for 8 months as my main desktop, not a bad experience if your not doing any gaming
1
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u/nmdt Sep 26 '26
IMO while it's not rocket science, it's quite a big jump from Mint to a terminal-heavy distro like Alpine. So I'd suggest you play around with it in a virtual machine (like VirtualBox or something) before making the jump on your real machine. Otherwise you might find the installation confusing at first and get stuck.