My Experience On Alpine

2026-08-29

I'm back on Alpine yet again. It's a pretty good distro, and hasn't really caused any issues for me so far. Aside from user services, yeah it's perfectly servicable. My stuff works, the system is clean, the stack is nice (musl, BusyBox, etc), and it has overall being quite a pleasant experience. I'm running swindle alongside yawc as my compositors of choice. They've been working quite nicely for my use-case (coding, reading E-books, watching anime, etc).

I've had a few people tell me that Alpine isn't usable for daily-driving because of things that require glibc or GNU coreutils (Steam, AppImages, some shell scripts, etc), but I personally don't use any of those or actively avoid them, as they actively hinder portabilit and whatnot, but I'll expand on that in another blog (hopefully),

I'd recommend it as a distro for people to use and play around with provided that the user's hardware doesn't require any proprietary rubbish (NVIDIA drivers, etc) compiled against glibc, as they will not work on Alpine (although in the case of NVIDIA drivers, it can be resolved via installing the OSS drivers).

Something I noticed with Alpine is how it doesn't ship the same PAM thingy that other distributions (Gentoo, Artix OpenRC, etc) would ship with OpenRC. In the Alpine repositories, its called openrc-user-pam and you have to symlink it as a per-user service + enable it at boot (doas ln -s /etc/init.d/user /etc/init.d/user.$USER & doas rc-update add user.$USER default). This will allow you to use user services (auto pipewire, etc), which is pretty useful for people coming from distributions with init systems that have this feature (systemd, dinit, etc).

Although my experience has been pleasant, I do have a few bones to pick. For one, I personally dislike OpenRC (I'm more of a runit/dinit person) and apk kinda sucks (to be fair this is more of a category error because I'm more of a declarative person).