We use Alpine on various IoT devices at my job. But I thought I would setup a VM, and see if it's a viable working "daily driver" option.
If you want "THE" lightest weight distro out there, this is it. It starts out as a bare bones minimum installation, it's a little like puppy, in that it wants to run in RAM from the iso by default. The installer isn't a standard GUI installer like most distro's have to today, you have to start from the command line. You can install wayland, and fairly recent versions of the mainstream DE's (KDE/Plasma, Gnome, Xfce, Sway, etc...
The default install runs in about 800mb of RAM, takes up about 200mb of disk space. Less than 1GB RAM, less than 256mb of disk space.
No bash by default, no nano, no vim, no whet, no curl, no inxi, no lshw, ... all these things can be installed, but none are installed by default.
Alpine has it's own package manager, apk. It's more like apt than dnf, you have to update the apk cache before you install anything.
It takes a little getting used to. apk update, apk add (pkg), apk del (pkg). apk list, apk search. It even supports software groups.
It uses rc.unit as the service manager. No systemd, no sysVinit. You get the best (and worst) of both worlds. Is is lightweight than systemd, but it's more robust than sysVinit (cgroups, pids, etc..)
all in all, not too bad. I haven't had any problems with it at all (at least not yet). But I have to say, if you're looking for the lightest modern distro to run (there is also a 32-bit version), I don't think you can beat alpine. No bloat, no extras, it's about as small as it gets.
If you want "THE" lightest weight distro out there, this is it. It starts out as a bare bones minimum installation, it's a little like puppy, in that it wants to run in RAM from the iso by default. The installer isn't a standard GUI installer like most distro's have to today, you have to start from the command line. You can install wayland, and fairly recent versions of the mainstream DE's (KDE/Plasma, Gnome, Xfce, Sway, etc...
The default install runs in about 800mb of RAM, takes up about 200mb of disk space. Less than 1GB RAM, less than 256mb of disk space.
No bash by default, no nano, no vim, no whet, no curl, no inxi, no lshw, ... all these things can be installed, but none are installed by default.
Alpine has it's own package manager, apk. It's more like apt than dnf, you have to update the apk cache before you install anything.
It takes a little getting used to. apk update, apk add (pkg), apk del (pkg). apk list, apk search. It even supports software groups.
It uses rc.unit as the service manager. No systemd, no sysVinit. You get the best (and worst) of both worlds. Is is lightweight than systemd, but it's more robust than sysVinit (cgroups, pids, etc..)
all in all, not too bad. I haven't had any problems with it at all (at least not yet). But I have to say, if you're looking for the lightest modern distro to run (there is also a 32-bit version), I don't think you can beat alpine. No bloat, no extras, it's about as small as it gets.
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