Alpine Linux

Reader supplied reviews for Alpine Linux Average rating 9.1 from 27 review(s) Please specify which version of the distribtion you are reviewing. Please selecting 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: -- 3.18.03.17.33.16.53.15.83.14.103.13.123.12.113.10.63.6.23.2.22.7.81.10.6 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: 3.18.0 Rating: 10 Date: 2023-05-12 Votes: 7 Very nice! It isn't as bloated as most other distributions, it's package manager is nice, and it's a good experience, with good security also. It isn't without downsides though. It suffers the same issue as Void Linux (poor distro-specific documentation), and the package base is small. This forces you to sometimes manually compile things, which is often fine and also educational, but it sometimes causes headaches. There's also a heavy reliance on Flatpaks for many things. Also, here's a tip: If you use flatpaks on here, and also use pulseaudio, use "pulseaudio --start && flatpak run [thing]" to run the aforementioned flatpaks. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 3.17.3 Rating: 10 Date: 2023-04-26 Votes: 14 Alpine is an Ethical, Safe, Secure, Stable, Fast, Fun and well thought out system. I'm using it as a base operating system on a couple laptops for various programming and research projects. The main reason I pursued using Alpine is world class security. Having musl, a custom busybox (less suid, static links), the small foot print (in this case, less is better), the ability to dismiss any drivers and configure the system as I see fit, sold me. Are you tired of titanic sized, insecure systemd bloatware, "convenience model" systems leaving you open to all sorts of attacks, built by wanna-be hackers? then; Use Alpine, it's solved those issues and more for me. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 3.17.3 Rating: 10 Date: 2023-04-04 Votes: 12 An Alpine JWM desktop can start with ~30mb memory usage. Minimalism and extending the lifespan of a computer is my kind of hobby :o) For me Alpine is the ideal distro for x86 32bit hardware with a desktop. I managed smoothly streaming video's with Alpine and JWM as desktop under 64 MB. X and JWM start up here with a total mem usage of ~30mb. With wifi and the DRM driver blacklisted (and all DRM drivers removed in the initramfs too to even be able to boot). Bare and stable. No bloat installed. When Alpine v3.15+ turned towards DRM-only-drivers it became too big and slow for 64mb. There was a too big regression in performance and choices. So now I run v3.17.3 with the kernel from v3.14.10. Compiling the kernel yourself is an option, but on this machine it means endless swapping and days or even weeks of waiting ...... :o( End of Alpine v3.14.10 is may 2023. I hope for 25 years of prolonged sequrity updates for this version :o) Void has no 32bit musl version. Alpine 3.17.3 also runs on my "Multi Media Center for a Raspberry PI zero" without the above kernel change. The X and a JWM desktop start with a memory consumption of 41 mb (the mb's for wifi and barrier and the mrxvt terminal to type "free" are hereby included). GTK+2.0 is still present in the repos and DIY builds for GTK+2.0 give an enormous powerboost. GTK+3.0 became far too heavy. No standard webbrowser will run nicely on a rpi0 because of the also heavy javascript. Netsurf GTK+2.0 is the (beautiful!) only one that still shows some erformance here. But with the help of the Alpine repos streaming iptv & ipradio is well possible with smooth running DIY grafical menu's. The grafical chip of the RPI0/1 is a nice one and Alpine performs well here. The APKBUILD of Alpine do not differ much from the PKGBUILD from Arch. APKBUILD's might even be a little bit more streamlined :o) My Fear: Is Alpine also going to bloat itself, just like the other distro's? Indeed Windows 98 also ran on 64mb. So it seems clear that progression, in general, means a big regression on the memory and performance side. With far too much unnessecary material waste as a result. All in all. Alpine is a wonderfull and very special distro! Big thanks for Alpine that it could realize what (all?) others can't achieve in today's memory consumption and ease. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 27 reader reviews of Alpine Linux...