Subject: Why'd you go with Alpine Linux?

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2026 23:56:25 +0200 (CEST)

It's a silly question, I know, but idk, I wanted to write something to this mailing list haha. In my case, the answer isn't that deep: I wanted a challenge, I thought of Alpine as something hard to use, so I wanted to try and see how much I could pull off. And of course, I'd also read that it was low end friendly, which was really important to me, I think I spent like 2 or 3 days setting up my desktop environment and relevant configs, reading wikis, guides, trying to get everything exactly how I like it and how I was used to. 

But honestly, after that "complicated" start, I really liked it, and it's been a super stable experience, I've barely changed my initial setup because everything works for what I need and everything is how it should be. I stayed with Alpine after finishing that personal challenge because after building my desktop environment for the first time and getting under the hood like I never had with any other distro, it felt like "mine", for me, my Alpine is my favorite distro because it's an OS I tailored to myself, it's not perfect, but I'm honestly totally in love with it. I find it really hard to see myself moving away from Alpine anytime soon, I just feel at home here... anyway, what's your story?

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From: Ralf Mardorf <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 02 Apr 2026 07:24:04 +0200

Hi,

I installed Alpine to get a sense of the limitations I would face if I
ever found myself in the position of having to set up an embedded
system.

To set up a tailored OS for everyday use on my desktop PC, I chose Arch
Linux, partly because it has a build system comparable to FreeBSD ports
and probably the most up-to-date, comprehensive wiki. If I absolutely
wanted to avoid systemd but also wanted to avoid the limitations of
BusyBox and musl, I would probably consider Gentoo or something similar.

In any case, you can customize Ubuntu yourself to be similar to Alpine
or Arch by choosing the simplest installation option (server or
something similar) then deselecting everything else you can in the
installer, and after installation, immediately disabling all the systemd
services that aren’t necessary. Starting from there, you’ll have
something like Alpine or Arch with Ubuntu, with the exception that
building .deb packages is a bit of a hassle, but still doable.

Regards,
Ralf

-- 
The Moon—forget all the nonsense they spread about it. It merely offers
us more space for destruction, exploitation, and war. We’re destroying a
turnkey ready Earth and believe we can build new habitats on other
celestial bodies and gain insights there. Bathing in champagne would be
less arrogant and decadent—and, above all, cheaper.

---

From: Marcus Rohrmoser <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2026 09:28:41 +0200

On Thu, 02 Apr 2026 07:24:04 +0200
Ralf Mardorf <[email-masked]> wrote:

> you can customize Ubuntu yourself to be similar to Alpine
> or Arch

you can put a leash on a cat. But why would you? And would it bark?

/Marcus

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From: Wolfgang Klein <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2026 20:58:09 +0200

Hello!

I first encountered Alpine in the form of PostmarketOS, which I 
installed into my Lenovo Chromebook, turning it into a Linux-Book with 
full KDE desktop. The device has never worked so flawlessly and 
smoothly, and I can use the same desktop environment as on my PC. 
Absolutely awesome! :)

My second encounter to Alpine was when I needed a replacement for a 
Samba server running Ubuntu, which was getting more and more unreliable 
because of the "old" hardware: a "week" Dual-Core and "only" 2GB RAM.) 
Since I knew that Alpine was working very well on such slim and older 
systems, I decided to give it a try. And I do not regret this step at 
all! A couple of adjustmens needed to be done, like scripts using 
commands not available in Alpine, but those problems could be solved. 
The result of this effort: that server is running more reliable and 
robust like ever before!

Cheers,
Wolfgang

---

From: Jerome Marc <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2026 22:07:32 +0200

Hello,

same here : postmarketos with KDE for my Acer Chromebook. I just regret
that I didn't do it before.
I also use Alpine in diskless mode on an old Raspberry pi.  There is
virtually no risk to corrupt the sd card, it's snappy and very stable.

I prefer the apk package manager (vs apt) because it's easier to control
which software you install overtime. Other distros have too many packages
and dependency management can be tough.
The only downside (for desktop) is the missing glibc. There are solutions
(gcompat or flatpack) but I wonder if it couldn't be possible to implement
a transparent glibc emulation for binaries not linked to gcompat.

Le jeu. 2 avr. 2026 à 20:58, Wolfgang Klein <[email-masked]> a écrit :

> Hello!
>
> I first encountered Alpine in the form of PostmarketOS, which I installed
> into my Lenovo Chromebook, turning it into a Linux-Book with full KDE
> desktop. The device has never worked so flawlessly and smoothly, and I can
> use the same desktop environment as on my PC. Absolutely awesome! :)
>
> My second encounter to Alpine was when I needed a replacement for a Samba
> server running Ubuntu, which was getting more and more unreliable because
> of the "old" hardware: a "week" Dual-Core and "only" 2GB RAM.) Since I knew
> that Alpine was working very well on such slim and older systems, I decided
> to give it a try. And I do not regret this step at all! A couple of
> adjustmens needed to be done, like scripts using commands not available in
> Alpine, but those problems could be solved. The result of this effort: that
> server is running more reliable and robust like ever before!
>
>
> Cheers,
> Wolfgang
>

---

From: Ralf Mardorf <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:55:36 +0200

First of all, I’d like to say that a distro built on BusyBox and Musl
has its advantages. Alpine is, without a doubt, an excellent distro.

However, I have a hard time with some of the statements because I can’t
quite wrap my head around them.

On Thu, 2026-04-02 at 20:58 +0200, Wolfgang Klein wrote:
> with full KDE desktop

For me, as someone who uses the command line instead of file managers
and who doesn’t use a desktop environment at all (just a window manager)
regardless of what Linux or FreeeBSD based BSD I run, I don’t see the
point of installing a bloated desktop environment on top of a system
based on BusyBox and Musl, nor do I see how it ends up being any lighter
than any user-friendly major distro.

On Thu, 2026-04-02 at 22:07 +0200, Jerome Marc wrote:
> I prefer the apk package manager (vs apt) because it's easier to
> control which software you install overtime.

There’s no question that building deb packages is a hassle, it hardly
gets any worse than that (and even that happens), but I don’t understand
why it should be a problem with apt to keep track of which software
you’ve installed over time. Could you please explain in what way apt is
supposed to be worse in this regard than any other package manager for
any other package format?

---

From: Jerome Marc <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2026 02:01:07 +0200

apk makes a clear difference between a package installed explicitly or as a
dependency. Therefore removing a package removes useless dependencies
automatically. No need to use things like  autoremove. Plus apk supports
diskless mode natively. Plus apt uses much more packages which creates
complexity. I find apk is easier to go and is faster also. I used
debian/ubuntu for years.

Plasma is not bloatware. And memory footprint is ok, lower than with gnome
actually. It supports touchscreen and tablet mode on my tiny arm64
chromebook. The user experience is amazing compared to the pathetic
ChromeOS it was running before. Imagine that Chrome OS is less efficient
than Alpine KDE : slower,  memory hungry (thanks to the VM/containers mess
that Google introduced to isolates subsystems)

The only downside is musl for apps compatibility. But I can use flatpack in
this case. Flatpack consumes more memory but it's the same for the other
distro. At least the Alpine base system is lighter so it gives more room
for applications.

So yes it sounds surprising but Alpine (and postmarketos) offer a really
good desktop experience. My 8gb chromebook is my main machine now when it
has become almost useless overtime under ChromeOS). Anyway I don't have a
choice: postmarketos is the only distro supporting this computer.

Le ven. 3 avr. 2026 à 00:55, Ralf Mardorf <[email-masked]> a

---

From: Ralf Mardorf <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 03 Apr 2026 02:07:50 +0200

On Fri, 2026-04-03 at 02:01 +0200, Jerome Marc wrote:
> It supports touchscreen and tablet mode on my tiny arm64 chromebook.
> The user experience is amazing compared to the pathetic ChromeOS
> it was running before. Imagine that Chrome OS is less efficient than
> Alpine KDE : slower,  memory hungry (thanks to the VM/containers mess

Good point! I wasn't aware of that, since my tablets run either on a
jailbroken iOS or pure iPadOS anyway. If it were possible, I'd love to
switch away from Apple in this regard, but given my requirements, I'm
afraid I don't see the slightest chance of that happening in my
lifetime.

---

From: Ralf Mardorf <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 03 Apr 2026 02:28:40 +0200

On Fri, 2026-04-03 at 02:01 +0200, Jerome Marc wrote:
> apk makes a clear difference between a package installed explicitly or
> as a dependency. Therefore removing a package removes useless
> dependencies automatically. No need to use things like  autoremove.
> Plus apk supports diskless mode natively. Plus apt uses much more
> packages which creates complexity. I find apk is easier to go and is
> faster also. I used debian/ubuntu for years.

Okay, the Debian/Ubuntu policy doesn't sit well with me either, but
keeping track of installed packages and their dependencies isn't rocket
science. Anyway, I get what you mean now. Before, it sounded a bit
esoteric to me.

---

From: Wolfgang Klein <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2026 08:47:49 +0200

> than any user-friendly major distro.

I think you should try a setup like the one I described and see for 
yourself that KDE is not as "bloated" as you might remember it. Yes, I 
agree: it used to be a heavy load for a PC and even more so for 
notebooks when it was created, but those days are gone! KDE/Plasma today 
is a real pleasure to use and it works very well on my ex-Chromebook. 
Right now I'm writing this message on it, running KDE as my desktop, 
Betterbird as my MUA, Firefox for surfing, and I really can't complain 
about performance.

Of course, I would not even try to do video editing or play a modern 
game on it, that is understood. But for office tasks, internet surfing, 
watching videos, or running remote diagnostics and stuff like that, it's 
perfect. It's not too heavy, it's not too big, it gives me up to 10 
hours of battery usage, and I can charge it at any USB port I can find.

Furthermore, PostmarketOS was/is the only Linux distribution I can find 
that works on my "old" Lenovo, and I am very happy with it. Besides: POS 
offer different kinds of user interfaces, not just KDE, and they all are 
adjusted to small systems like phones and tablets.

Sorry for getting a bit off-topic, but I felt the urge to mention this, 
because I think PostmarketOS deserve much more public attention as they do.

Happy Easter!
Wolfgang

---

From: Ralf Mardorf <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 04 Apr 2026 11:32:38 +0200

On Fri, 2026-04-03 at 08:47 +0200, Wolfgang Klein wrote:
> yourself that KDE is not as "bloated" as you might remember it.

Hi,

I wasn't aware that KDE had become more lightweight. Still, I'm not
interested in KDE, since I generally only use window managers without
desktop environments. I also have a few issues with KDE, such as the
problem with those old-fashioned green external hard drives. In GTK
environments, gvfs constantly causes these old green hard drives to spin
up and down. The solution is to not install gvfs or, if necessary, use a
dummy package to pretend it’s installed so the dependencies are met.
There’s also a mechanism in KDE that causes this nonsense, but I’ve
never been able to find it. The problem with the green drives isn’t
really that bad for me anymore, since I only have one of them and,
fortunately, many others that don’t force standby mode. If you want to
buy external drives today, you have to write a script anyway to prevent
them from going into standby mode so that no I/O errors occur. So the
problem with gvfs and whatever is going on with KDE is actually a thing
of the past. I recently wanted to reorder new enclosures for external
hard drives, but my favorites are no longer available, and every
manufacturer I contacted confirmed that they no longer make drives that
spin continuously, nowadays they all force standby mode. But there’s
something else that’s pretty annoying. Here’s a workaround for Ardour
under KDE on X: https://manual.ardour.org/ardour-configuration/system-specific-setup/kde-plasma-5/ .
Other programs are affected as well. And there are a few other things I
don’t like. As I said, I prefer simple window managers without
additional layers on top, and I do a lot of things by command line
anyway. Bashisms ( https://mywiki.wooledge.org/Bashism ) clearly don’t
belong in scripts, but they’re sometimes useful for working in the
command line. That saves me from having to use a file manager.

Regards,
Ralf

---

From: Ralf Mardorf <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 04 Apr 2026 12:01:40 +0200

On Sat, 2026-04-04 at 11:32 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> I recently wanted to reorder new enclosures for external
> manufacturer I contacted confirmed that they no longer make drives
> that spin continuously, nowadays they all force standby mode.

This should read that the controllers of the USB to SATA controllers of
those enclosures force stand by. That I mentioned drives was an
accident. The drives aren't the culprits.

---

From: Ralf Mardorf <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 04 Apr 2026 12:04:40 +0200

On Sat, 2026-04-04 at 12:01 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> This should read that the controllers of the USB to SATA controllers
                            ^^^^^^^^^^^ firmware
> of those enclosures force stand by. That I mentioned drives was an

It's just not my day. ;D

---

From: Wolfgang Klein <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 4 Apr 2026 14:55:55 +0200

Hello,

Ralf Mardorf wrote:

> under KDE on X:https://manual.ardour.org/ardour-configuration/system-specific-setup/kde-plasma-5/ 

I'm afraid you're not up to date: I haven't seen this issue in Plasma 
6.x, which has been the latest incarnation for at least 2 years now, 
neither on my desktop, nor on my ECNL*-Book.

I am not trying to convince you to use KDE, I am always a bit irritated 
when people tell stories, good or bad, about something they don't use 
themself or that they even haven't tried. No offence meant, but that's 
not a good base to discuss about things.

And by the way: a disks spin down time can be set using "hdparm -S", and 
if for some reason that doesn't work, eg the drive not supporting this 
option, there's always good old chron that can do a job like "ls $DEVICE 
 >/dev/null" or " fdisk -l > /dev/null" or something similar every 5 
Minutes or so, which should keep the drive(s) active.

Wolfgang

*Ex-Chrom-Now-Linux ;)

---

From: Ralf Mardorf <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 04 Apr 2026 18:24:14 +0200

OT:

On Sat, 2026-04-04 at 14:55 +0200, Wolfgang Klein wrote:
> And by the way: a disks spin down time can be set using "hdparm -S"

Yes, it is possible to control hard drives. The problem lies in the
firmware of the new controllers (USB-to-SATA) in the latest enclosures.
It used to be difficult to find enclosures that didn’t have this
problem, but some manufacturers did offer such enclosures. BTW none of
the HDDs or SSDs I’ve ever bought go into sleep mode. Standby mode was
always disabled by default.

I have 10 FANTEC DB-ALU3e enclosures with good firmware, but they are no
longer manufactured, and all recommendations for enclosures from other
companies that I received in mailing lists ot that are mentioned by
internet forums are obsolete. I have contacted the support of each of
these companies.

At least one support representative tried to pull the wool over my eyes.
They claimed that Windows could disable the controller’s standby mode.
That’s nonsense, of course. There are, of course, various workarounds.

I’ll have no choice but to use also workarounds in the future, but I
actually dislike them, because a workaround for something that could
have been done right in the first place is always bullshit.

One of the many workarounds that other users use, funny enough, bash
mentioned in a FreeBSD mailing list:

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Cc: FreeBSD Questions <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: PS: Not that SATA to USB controller question again
Date: 02/06/2026 03:10:48 PM

[snip]

in /etc/rc.local:

/root/bin/dyski.sh &

/root/bin/dyski.sh:

#!/usr/local/bin/bash
while true;do
  for x in fi1 data fi2 fi3;do
   dd if=/dev/label/$x of=/dev/null bs=4k count=1 >/dev/null 2>/dev/null
  done
  sleep 120
done

problem solved

---

From: Stuart Longland VK4MSL <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2026 09:16:30 +1000

On 2/4/26 07:56, [email-masked] wrote:
> It's a silly question, I know, but idk, I wanted to write something
> to this mailing list haha. In my case, the answer isn't that deep: I
> wanted a challenge, I thought of Alpine as something hard to use, so
> I wanted to try and see how much I could pull off. And of course,
> I'd also read that it was low end friendly, which was really
> important to me, I think I spent like 2 or 3 days setting up my
> desktop environment and relevant configs, reading wikis, guides,
> trying to get everything exactly how I like it and how I was used
> to.

I ran a lot of servers on Gentoo Linux using the `musl` C library.  Good 
option if you need something bespoke, but the maintenance burden is high 
when you've got more than about a dozen machines that must be regularly 
updated.

Gentoo being rolling release, means you face an uphill battle if you 
leave updates too long.  I have one machine left running Gentoo, an 
ARMv5 industrial PC, and preparing new stages for updating it has been a 
multi-month battle that I'm only *just* beginning to get the upper hand 
on.  (I was going to use Gentoo to bootstrap a port of AlpineLinux to 
install on there, but with AlpineLinux dropping ARMv6 I doubt they'll 
accept a contribution of an ARMv5 port.)

AlpineLinux uses `musl` C library (same as the version of Gentoo I was 
using), `openrc` (same as Gentoo), and has a sane and simple package 
manager that's easy to manage with something like Ansible, and unlike 
Gentoo, has stable release branches (it isn't rolling release).

Using `busybox` also reduces the attack surface greatly.
-- 
Stuart Longland (aka Redhatter, VK4MSL)

I haven't lost my mind...
   ...it's backed up on a tape somewhere.

---

From: Ralf Mardorf <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 03 Apr 2026 01:39:27 +0200

On Fri, 2026-04-03 at 09:16 +1000, Stuart Longland VK4MSL wrote:
> AlpineLinux [...] unlike Gentoo, has stable release branches (it isn't
> rolling release).

My main Linux distribution is Arch Linux, and I understand the arguments
in favor of both distributions with a fixed release cycle and those with
a rolling release. Both approaches have pros and cons that need to be
weighed. The fact that "Alpine" of user-centric distributions is based
on releases rather than a rolling release can indeed be a major
advantage. Good point and for me, the only good point mentioned so far!

---

From: Stuart Longland VK4MSL <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2026 09:42:25 +1000

On 3/4/26 09:39, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> The fact that "Alpine" of user-centric distributions is based

`openrc` vs `systemd` is also a differentiating point for me.  `openrc` 
gets the job done in more places.

(`systemd` doesn't support *BSD for example.)
-- 
Stuart Longland (aka Redhatter, VK4MSL)

---

From: Ralf Mardorf <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 03 Apr 2026 01:56:32 +0200

On Fri, 2026-04-03 at 09:42 +1000, Stuart Longland VK4MSL wrote:
> `openrc` vs `systemd` is also a differentiating point for me. 
> `openrc` gets the job done in more places.
> 

Fortunately, because of the way I use my desktop PC, I’m hardly affected
by the drawbacks of systemd.

I’m not exactly jumping for joy that my favorite Linux distro for
desktop PCs is based on systemd, but as I’ve already mentioned, as far
as I know, you have a choice with Gentoo, so if systemd becomes even
more unbearable, I’ll switch from Arch to Gentoo for all I care. If,
like me, you have reasons (albeit with a heavy heart—to) choose Linux
over BSD anyway, then you can... well, I can... tolerate systemd, as
long as it has little impact on my daily use.

---

From: Pete French <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 4 Apr 2026 14:33:03 +0100

> (`systemd` doesn't support *BSD for example.)

Ditto. For me, rc files, zfs, and static linking are the killers.

I run a network of BSD machines, and I've never really used anything 
other than Unix of some flavour. But occasionally I will need to run 
something which is Linux-only for some reason. Alpine is my goto for 
this as it's is the most similar to all the other systems I use/have 
used. Just easy to find my way around, and get stuff done.

[ oh, and ZFS doesnt break when I upgrade! unlike others I've tried ]

-pete.

---

From: Harald Weidner <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 4 Apr 2026 17:47:59 +0200

Hello,

I use Alpine Linux for everything Kubernetes related, both on the nodes and
within the containers.

Alpine does contain almost every package you need for running Kubernetes,
like k3s, helm, k9s, argocd, traefik or caddy. So clusters can be set up
with minimal scripting or Ansible playbooks.

Best regards,
Harald