Alpine Linux

Reader supplied reviews for Alpine Linux Average rating 9.0 from 30 review(s) 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: -- 3.18.43.17.53.16.73.15.103.14.103.13.123.12.113.10.63.6.23.2.22.7.81.10.6 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: 3.18.3 Rating: 10 Date: 2023-09-12 Votes: 59 Security focused. Lightweight. Lightweight dependencies. Very stable. Not for new users. Choice of init system, all pros. Alpine is used in many containers, so actual use is much larger because of Docker. apt is the best rep tool I've ever used, and I have used RPM, YAST, YUM, Apt-get, emerge, and portage to name a few. The edge repo has all the latest software and tools. The installer could be a little better, and the minimal root file system could be a little more complete. Alpine makes setting up a wifi router/firewall dirt simple on a small embedded computer like a nanoPi or Pi zeroW. The last time I was this impressed was back when Ubuntu was on version 7 or 8, back when the LTS was rock solid stable. I had just encountered rpm hell with Fedora and decided if the package manager was this bad, I wanted out. When the Precise release came out and was so buggy, I switched to debian, and when debian went to systemd, I went to devuan, but wasn't really satisfied, so tried Antix, but conman was broken on multiple releases, so I eventually tried Alpine and haven't looked back yet. The only downfall of Alpine (which makes it secure) is that it is musl based, so I run chroots of debian to use glibc based applications. It's pretty simple using debootstrap to build a chroot. It also isolates glibc applications in a chroot. I've personally experienced the bloat, insanity, and bugginess that comes with glibc. Look for the 8,000 line patch made by a Red Hat developer to glibc to fix an overlapped memcpy in an Adobe flash player. I found it because it caused a 24x slowdown in one of our memcpy functions. It would be nice to see more musl based distros and applications. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 3.18.3 Rating: 8 Date: 2023-09-11 Votes: 3 Nice overall distribution. Simple in ideology and execution. For me personally the issue is with the musl libs. You simply can't get all of the apps that you need and will often find yourself struggling with missing libraries which are not present in the musl library collection. Personally I use Signal on daily basis and it's simply not available via the musl libraries due to some missing lib dependencies. This can extend to many other apps depending on what you are using it could be a deal breaker. So I would recommend researching your "must have" apps availability in the musl ecosystem before diving into this head first cause you might find that there are limitations there. Void linux for example solves this by offering both a libc and musl versions of their distro, it would be nice if Alpine did the same. But that's just my take on things. Overall tho it's a pretty nonsense-free distribution and if you don't mind some of the musl shortcomings then I'm sure you'll appreciate it's simplicity and stability. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 3.18.2 Rating: 8 Date: 2023-07-30 Votes: 11 -1 star for LXQT for not being anything remotely ready for primetime. Buggy, incomplete, problematic. That was day 1. Installing XFCE was a gigantic relief because that would assemble and was a nifty, complete implementation. -1 for closing their email list ("new registration no longer accepted") to people that want to join their community. Mastadon/IM just seems like a poor alternative since many of us don't want to IM. Other than that, great adventure. I had to raise my modest skill level to make this work. It's a skeleton CLI operating with no DE, a few degrees separated from Linux From Scratch, and you are in the complete control. I loved it. If forces you to really think about what you are installing. You enable your own services. You can read all the comments on here, or all the internet reviews, and they are all torn on one thing. Half the people believe this is just a Server distro and the other half think it's a Complete Desktop experience. I wanted a secure Daily Driver and I got one. Was it meant for this? I don't know yet. Kudos to their fantastic and easy documentation. Problems will come up in configuring as you go, and all of mine could be remedied quickly with their information. This has no bells and whistles or flash outside of what xfce4 offers, and if you want bells and whistles, Alpine will be happy if you go back to Ubuntu. I respect this. Alpine is very much a mindset. I eschewed their own awall for ufw, and had to install iptables, but that's part of the fun. I pick and choose. OpenRC is fast fast fast. I have 5 of their repos enabled and it's a modest offering with firefox and chromium the only GUI browsers really. When there are about 6-7 vim/keyboard browsers curated that should tell you something.....:) All my favorite CLI tools are there. And it supports Flatpak so I really have to be conservative in my approach but I love the option. I like Alpine and I'm sticking with it. I wrote this on day 4 of using Alpine daily. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 30 reader reviews of Alpine Linux...