Alpine Linux

Reader supplied reviews for Alpine Linux Average rating 8.9 from 51 review(s) Please specify which version of the distribtion you are reviewing. Please select 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: -- 3.23.23.22.23.21.53.20.83.19.93.18.123.17.103.16.93.15.113.14.103.13.123.12.113.10.63.6.23.2.22.7.81.10.6 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: 3.23.0 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-12-07 Votes: 14 Desktop review. Been using Alpine on 4 laptops for the past 5+ years. Its important to understand Alpine is not just some minimal server/docker/minimal hardware distro. It functions very well as a desktop system. PRO Minimal install and expand from there. Very nice to observe and control what packages are installed from the minimal base and then beyond. You start with a basic install of a few packages and then expand from there to a full desktop. Installing only what you want, or opt for a defined desktop install. My personal choice is XFCE; installing fully custom to my choice, as well as using Alpine defined XFCE install. Similar to any other linux install, fully functional everyday desktop, everything works; usb connections, sound, wifi... Applications in the repository; firefox and other browsers, libreoffice, pdf viewers... Trustworthy and competent distro maintainers and developers. Never had an issue with system upgrades. Doesnt seem to be much Alpine application code modification over the base code. NO systemd; openrc init. CON Being MUSL based, there are glibc based applications that may not run in Alpine. Alpine application repositories are limited in what they provide; included are applications for an expanded functioning system, but NOT every possible application such that might be found in Debian or similar distro. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 3.22.2 Rating: 8 Date: 2025-11-25 Votes: 3 I have installed Alpine on both a raspberry pi 4 as a server and on my thinkpad laptop with KDE. Installing as a server was great, except I didn't realize that choosing sys (install on disk) can fail, so after doing lots of work with installing software and settings after a reboot they were all gone due to not having sys for some reason and not having done lbu commit (because I thought I had sys). Anyway, it somehow fixed itself after I did a lbu commit once so after the first lbu commit I never needed to do it again. Running the server was also great, and I really like the environment and the apk package manager. However, I am trying to install LDAP and it would get stuck on SSL/TLS issues which made me unable to continue (it was working fine without SSL/TLS). So I decided to try kanidm (inside a docker container) instead of LDAP and that had the same issues with SSL/TLS. So I suspect that the SSL/TLS issues are related somehow to musl. SSL/TLS was working fine with nginx however. Unfortunately, this means I can't stick with Alpine on my server because I need to use SSL/TLS. Installing on my laptop was a bit of a nightmare. Well, it installs fine, and on the laptop sys did stick on the first try. However, running setup-desktop it doesn't have any option for KDE, only lxqt. So installing KDE means figuring out every single package that should be part of the installation (which are sometimes named differently on Alpine than on other distributions, so you can't just copy a list from somewhere else). It took some effort, but once I managed to install everything, Alpine has been a joy to use on the laptop. Unfortunately, not being able to run Alpine on my servers means I won't stick with Alpine on the laptop because what's the point of that really. I don't want to remember that "oh I'm on this computer so I need to use this package manager"; I want the same basic system on all my instances. Best of luck to the Alpine team - you have a very good thing going, but missing some crucial components for me. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 3.19.8 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-09-12 Votes: 29 Alpine Linux An extremely lightweight Linux distribution that still packs a lot of modern capabilities into it, including smooth package installation, removal and updates. I use it for small (1GB RAM) cloud servers because of its low resource requirements and smaller attack profile on installation. It would also be a good choice for old hardware or low-powered physical machines like a Raspberry Pi or a Pine Star64: it supports ARM (both 32-bit and aarch64) and RISC-V, and still supports older architectures like PowerPC and 32-bit x86 in addition to the more common x86_64. Desktop environments work smoothly, though it does take a little effort to set one up. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 51 reader reviews of Alpine Linux...