Alpine Linux Observations

For the past two weeks, I have been completely living under native Alpine Linux and the following are my impressions so far. For the first week, I tested the working environment (i.e. basic dotfiles, etc) while under a Debian host, and everything went as smooth as it could. I hit zero snags. With that confidence under my belt, I grabbed my old ThinkPad X220T, “torrented” the actual ISO and installed on bare-metal.

Needless to say, things went as smooth, if not better as it was under chroot, with a better user experience due to testing the actual graphical environment. With all of that preface out of this ways, what are my snags?

Well … none!

There is nothing that I am missing from my main Debian and even my Ubuntu distros, Alpine simply gets out of your way, and lets you do work. Dam near every package you need, is an apk search or apk add call away and as long as you do not forget to install the appropriate doc package for the binary that you need, there is usually no problem.

For all of the things, that you cannot get off the manpages, the wiki does a solid job of steering you in the right place. For the most part, living under Alpine and performing all of the critical work that I do on a daily basis with Debian or Ubuntu has worked out just fine. Alpine Linux reminds of a BSD OS with a Linux twist. The question becomes, will I stay in it?