Alpine Linux

Reader supplied reviews for Alpine Linux Average rating 8.7 from 38 review(s) Please select a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 characters. What are your thoughts on Alpine Linux? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- 3.21.33.20.63.19.73.18.123.17.103.16.93.15.113.14.103.13.123.12.113.10.63.6.23.2.22.7.81.10.6 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 3.21.0 Rating: 6 Date: 2024-12-31 Votes: 0 At first, I fell in love with Alpine Linux. It used less RAM, was fast (it booted in a few seconds), and my experience with apk was pleasant. After trying it on physical hardware for a month or so though after getting bored of using Arch, I encountered many issues and had to make a bunch of compromises (which will be listed below). Some general information before we get into this: I have a pretty beefy computer, with a 9900k, 1050 Ti, and 32GB of RAM, and I also was using the alpha channel for packages. At the time (around two months ago), I was obsessed with making my computer use the lowest amount of memory possible. What was great: * apk was fast, and easy to use (best package manager I have come across) * Booted in a few seconds * Consistently used less than 1GB of memory with a bunch of programs open, without any (just my desktop) 250MB (got as low as 154MB with 9wm). * Used next to no storage What wasn't all that great: * Nouveau didn't work at all (X11 would refuse to start) * Setting up even integrated graphics was a hassle and took nearly an entire week for me to figure out * I was starting on C#, but sadly I could not install any programs (or vim language servers) which provided syntax highlighting and feedback (such as VSCodium) so I had to go without it * Minecraft (which I only really use for graphical testing these days), would not launch beyond version 1.18.2 * Occasionally, my monitor would start flashing as if the refresh rate was configured incorrectly when set to 60hz * As an extension to that, at 165hz the screen was weirdly dimmed, and at 144hz everything was fine * A pretty major one right off the bat: the installer wouldn't boot, so I had to install Alpine completely manually from Arch. It was for sure a cumbersome experience! * On top of all of that though, Alpine has a nearly nonexistent support community. Due to that, I had to figure out how to either solve my problems, or make less functional compromises. After this experience, I went back to Arch. I definitely miss apk and everything I liked about Alpine, but the issues I had were simply too major for me to stay. I personally am giving Alpine a 6/10 as I very much enjoyed everything but the issues I had with it. If this was on a VM though, I would have definitely given it a 10/10! Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 3.20.3 Rating: 9 Date: 2024-10-20 Votes: 100 Alpine works pretty much out of the box in an OpenBSD vmm virtual machine is not true for most Linux distros. It boots quicker than just about any Linux I have ever seen and being very minimal it runs Firefox acceptably fast over ssh on a OpenBSD host. It boots faster and runs Firefox much faster than an OpenBSD guest on VMM. Chrome is close to same speed on both though and slower for some reason on Alpine. Would give 10 out of 10 but it doesn't come with a RBAC system out of the tin. Also haven't run it on bare metal. Perfect for resource liteish vm environments though. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 3.20.1 Rating: 1 Date: 2024-07-10 Votes: 0 Alpine Linux has SSE and SSE2 as a CPU requirement . I don't know wether it is because of this but Alpine 3.20.0 and up will also not start anymore on my Pentium I,II and III hardware. This is a enormous great pity in many aspects! Who's next? Most distro's that claim they're suitable for i386, i486 , i586 or i686 processors also implement SSE(2). This makes them, in fact, only suiteable for the higher end i686 processors (approx.) starting with pentium IV. Distro's that still run on Pentium I,II and III hardware are becoming very rare now. Crazy! I really did put quite some time not to find the abounded "Illegal Instruction" in i386, i486 , i586 distro's. There is some luck because old non-active versions of Alpine linux are still there incl. the repos. And TinyCore Linux and NetBSD are active distro's that still continue respecting these old pc's. For me they seem the safest choice for now. To be honest I have to bring my vote for Alpine Linux back from 10 to 1 for Alpine seemed to have dropped support for old computers and old computers are my passion. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 38 reader reviews of Alpine Linux...