Alpine Linux

Reader supplied reviews for Alpine Linux Average rating 8.7 from 42 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: 3.21.3 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-04-18 Votes: 0 Pros: - Extremely lightweight and fast: Alpine is not only perfect for virtualization and embedded systems, but also for making the most out of old/low-end personal computers. - Easy to use and setup: the official wiki is amazing and contains step by step tutorials for almost anything you might need. I am kind of a newbie to Linux and yet I never had any issues setting up Alpine. - Stable as a rock: In over a month of extensive usage, including programming and gaming, I never encountered a single bug. Since packages are heavily tested before getting accepted in the main or community repositories, they're also less prone to bugs than in other distros I've tried. Minimalistic: Alpine ships with only the bare necessities. You'll have to install everything from a desktop environment to a network manager or a sound server yourself, but the wiki makes all of these trivial. This design philosophy allows you to have absolutely zero bloatware, your computer won't have anything in it that you haven't explicitly asked for. Cons: - since Alpine uses musl as its c library implementation, a lot of software doesn't run on it (most notably nvidia drivers). Flatpak can mitigate this issue but you still will find some software that just can't work on Alpine. - although as I said it's really easy to use, seeing it up requires some basic knowledge of IT terminology in order to answer the many questions the setup script will ask you. Users who are afraid of using the terminal will also have a hard time with Alpine because it doesn't come with a pre installed desktop environment Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 3.21.3 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-04-11 Votes: 8 I'm a Linux user since 1999. Stared with Slackware, when it was downloaded to 36 Floppy disks. I'd worked on Salckware, Redhat, Fedora, SUSE, Ubuntu, Debian and recently Mint I had started with Alpine since 3.18. I can say that 1- Fast, very fast. I installed version 3.21 with full desktop configuration+some applications like firefox, libreoffice via automated scripts and it it took ROUND 5MINUTES!!!. Latest Mint Linux took 35 Min on the same environment. I had successfully installed it on 256MB Ram P4 and P5. I was capable to port some old drivers for printer and scanners to Alpine. They worked fine So, I decide to build my own Distro based on Alpine favoring it for other bloat distros. I will focus to provide a distro for normal users working needs. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 3.21.3 Rating: 7 Date: 2025-03-24 Votes: 0 Alpine, by itself alone, is truly the best distribution by far I' ve tried so far, but it has some points to be improved. I'm reporting as a desktop user, more specifically running Plasma (which works very nice). Pros: - The fastest distribution I've ever tested (in between Arch, BigLinux, Xiva Studio, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Debian, OpenSUSE); - It is quite easy to "build" from instalation, because online reference is very good and has those very helpul "setup-something" scripts; - You get exactly what you set up on it (no bloats in any way); - OpenRC init (I have nothing against systemd, but, this is the best distro I've tested that not rely on systemd for its init process); - Flatpak (which is needed here, see below); - Stable, very stable if you don't enable the edge repository; - Fast, almost touch sensitive distro to use, with very efficient base (with musl and BusyBox, and apk, the best package manager I've seen on any O.S.). Cons (or, to be improved): - It has few applications in its repositories, enough for average use, but I miss some applications I can use in Arch or Mint, for example, leading me to user flatpak version of some apps; - Lack of support, you basically have the online guide to solve issues, even the issues link on webpage has issues (it opens to me a blank page with an empty table); - No proper Nvidia support (because of Nvidia itself not supporting musl C library) for proprietary driver; - No language support (even Plasma doesn't allow any aditional locale/language besides C.UTF-8). I really wish the devs would consider take this distro as a desktop O.S. with more priority, because even with these problems it's still very clean and pleasant to use. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 42 reader reviews of Alpine Linux...