Alpine Linux

“Alpine images still get plenty of security findings, often in the same dependencies your application needs regardless of the base image.”

“it looks pretty easy to setup your own repository, including build scripts for packages”

“Alpine can often also answer that call, but it lacks MIPS support”

“Mint is too big for something like this. You should go for something lighter weight like Alpine or NetBSD.”

“After playing around with old spec hardware I would say before OP gives up try installing Alpine Linux.”

“Alpine is great. I've run it on desktops, laptops, headless, and a Steam Deck and it's been mostly a good time.”

“If your install is small and you have enough ram it's possible to run it from RAM with persistence.”

“most of the useful software is in pre-built binary packages with the compile-time options you would have selected anyway”

“This is something that worries me with a distribution like Alpine Linux.”

“It beats Arch and Void hands down IMO when I was looking for a no fuss simple and minimalist yet up to date and secure system”

“I've come to enjoy it on desktop as well. I've even got it on a Steam Deck and it's... 90% great.”

“musl and limited packages is an inconvenience on server setups”

“With Alpine you are trading size for a lot of unexpected pain”

“Too many weird edge cases to deal with, especially related to Alpine using musl libc instead of glibc.”

“We had issues running our Node app on alpine. Specifically the dns lookup for our API calls were taking several hundred milliseconds every time.”

“Works well as a very minimal system, and I know everything very well because of it.”

“if you're basing on an Alpine image or something that would probably be more minimal / smaller”

“Alpine and Chimera however both are not reproducible or full source bootstrapped or signed and do not enforce code review”

“tiny Alpine-based containers that run .NET considerably well and are very well tested”

“most modern distros like alpine and nix have a yolo wikipedia style trust model”

“it was also the first distro to prioritise fast and small image creation”

“if you run an aarch64 VM with virtualization there is essentially no lag. It runs great.”

“Alpine boasts about the minimal image size but in reality you end up missing a lot of useful modern premium features”

“I've been a big fan of using Alpine's Edge release since before they had to drop linux-hardened and it's a really nice system to use as a daily driver.”

“Alpine is great, especially for anything single purposed and headless”

“I've been running perfectly usable alpine lxc system containers on as low as 32MB”

“running firewalls, NAS and servers on Alpine is about as simple as it gets”

“distros like nix and alpine fully skip caring about bare minimum supply chain security”

“If you've got a normal x86 machine, just install Alpine, run setup-xorg-base, apk add jwm”

“Alpine is also pretty good as a desktop OS; I've got a desktop and laptop on Alpine”

“If you were unhappy with transparency, simplicity, maintainability and thinness of Alpine Linux”

“community run or community oriented distros like Arch, Gentoo, Alpine, Linux Mint etc.”

“I had an RPi that was translating a serial port to TCP/IP in a difficult to access location, and it stayed doing its duty for years, Alpine is very solid.”

“by using musl instead of glibc the difference in size and resources used compared to regular distros is huge as well”

“This has caused me all types of trouble in unexpected places.”

“there are sometimes compatibility issues where packages expect certain dependencies that Alpine doesn't provide”

“The only Linux distro that actually lives up to that promise in my experience is Alpine.”

“I run stock Alpine on a desktop and a laptop, and I assure you it works great as a daily driver.”

“It's already packaged for both Alpine Linux and Homebrew which suits my ad-hoc needs wonderfully!”

“Runs completely from ram and is incredibly small which makes it easy to grok all running processes.”