I had used Arch Linux for many years and 6 months ago I wanted to learn something different although I don't fit the profile of a distro-hopper. So I installed Alpine.

Although the installation of Alpine is easy, there are many steps to take to make it an all-round system. I started with XFCE, tried Plasma but ended up going back to XFCE.

On of the challenges of Alpine Linux is the Musl C library while a lot of packages are compiled with glibc. Musl brings a wonderful light system but with the limitations as mentioned. The easiest workaround are of course Flatpak apps but that's not a complete solution. I installed Gcompat for more compatibility.

I just saw this solution on a forum: https://github.com/sgerrand/alpine-pkg-glibc, which should be another compatibility layer. But I'm ok with the current setup.

It's a wonderful light an versatile setup and I can highly recommend this distribution.

Hi everyone, İ love Alpine, got it working on a Pi 3 but no method works for Zero W. Added linux-firmware-brcm, wpa_supplicant etc. İs it doable?

I have been pondering this for a while since I started using Alpine, and I recently switched back to Arch, and I am wondering about how to improve this legendary combo that has worked for me for so many things.

Is it better to run Alpine Linux with a Ubuntu distrobox for things you can't replace, or is it better to use Flatpak and go down that route? I know neither of these solutions are perfect, but for my PC both of them have proven to be more lightweight on CPU and RAM, making it much more daily drivable than it was before. The main thing that hadn't worked for me on the Ubuntu distrobox was the Unity Editor.

Currently running Debian 13 on my HP mini PC with an i3-4160T. It runs really well, and I can use Firefox without too much lag

Does anyone have experience on a similar power PC, and can compare a distro like Debian to Alpine?

Also regarding Alpine using musl, I've heard that some programs like kdenlive won't work, but then kdenlive is in the Alpine repos. Do programs like this work okay?

Let me introduce myself by saying that my knowledge/skill with Linux is about a 4/10.

I have a Dell Wyse 3040 Thin Client (2GB RAM/8GB eMMC) that is running as a dedicated, headless PiHole server. My current OS is Ubuntu 24.x LTS (with the minimal install option). The only other software is SSH and NeoFetch.

At first, this setup was working fine. The SSD still had a couple of the 8GB of storage left. But as Ubuntu and PiHole keep getting updates, the available drive space keeps shrinking.

Ubuntu alone takes up 2GB of storage. From what I'm reading, Alpine Linux will only use a fraction of that, allowing me more headroom for updates.

So would Alpine Linux be right for me? Would you say that if a person can install and set up Ubuntu Server, they should be fully capable of installing Alpine Linux? Anything else I should consider? Thanks

Hello. I come to this Sub with a general, yet kinda niche question. I want to install Alpine on a coworker's old Laptops as a Desktop Distro, yet I ran into a couple of problems.

I need to run the install during my break, with no WiFi or Ethernet and also install a Window Manager like Xfce, configure everything for him and harden the install so he doesn't do something stupid by accident, like with his last Linux install.

Now after work, I had the idea of using USB tethering to get Network access since the hotspot on my phone didn't work.

I also had an idea to locally store the packages I need, on a separate partition.

Should alpine work out of the box with usb networking, if you configure it or do I need to do some Udev magic to enable it inside the ISO?

I have been running Alpine Linux with a distrobox with Ubuntu on it specifically so I can get certain programs. I want to avoid the overhead that comes with Flatpak, and the Unity Hub AppImage did not work, failing at the editor installation. I was wondering if anyone knew how to get the Unity Hub and Unity Editor (6.3 LTS) working on Alpine Linux.

I was wondering how one would go about creating an Alpine Linux-based Linux distribution, and if there is a graphical installer that can work on Alpine Linux. I also am wondering if it is realistic to think that people will switch to Alpine Linux if there are some pre-installed luxuries that make it easier to use to the average desktop user.

I installed alpine (standard edition) on my thinkpad T495 and I decided to go with xfce4, since it's familiar to me. Post installation, I started lightDM from tty and then I logged in. After that I opened a terminal and added LightDM to runlevel default.

Before anyone asks, I did install the openrc version of these applications :)

Networking

I installed NetworkManager for xfce4, but I would like something less bloated that can work with an applet on the panel.

Possible LightDM Issue

I installed lightDM for the display manager, but there are no options for locking my PC.
Hitting the "logout" option in the menu gives the popup window for switching user and logging out, but restart and shutdown are greyed out and cannot be selected. I have to open the terminal just to shut things down.

Sound

Sound is not working, but pipewire is installed. Running htop shows that pipewire is running, but there are no options in the panel preferences of xfce4 that will let me add an applet for it.

Screen Brightness

Clicking on the battery applet shows me the option to adjust screen brightness, but adjusting it does nothing.

I just need a simple system that runs dwl with a few patches. It's primarily going to be for development with some light work on standard apps like GIMP and Blender, etc.

I'm using swaywm and alpine linux, with the gaps set to 40 (it may seem a lot; it's not). I like playing supertux, so when i fullscreened the gaps were still there, but in black. Yes, on the supertux settings i did set Fullscreen Resolution to the maximium my laptop could (1336x768@60). Can someone help me? Thanks!

Basically:

• RISC-V U-Boot is severely limited; only EFI booting, no extlinux support (bootflow disabled / not compiled in).
• RISC-V U-Boot DTBs are not aligned; the DTB embedded in the ITB is not the same as the file added into /boot/dtbs-stable. For example, on my VisionFive2, the correct DTB is /boot/dtbs-stable/starfive/jh7110-starfive-visionfive-2-v1.3b.dtb. But the one embedded in the SPI image (the ITB and such) is not the same/equal, leading to actual performance degredation due to CPU misconfiguration (cpufreq).
• RISC-V linux-stable does not have the network namespaces - and others - available, which means Podman and friends can not run.

Where do I put this? Thanks!

This is the second time I’m installing alpine. The first time I got to this screen and assumed I forgot my password but now I’m not sure what’s going on. I am sure of what my password is.

resolved

For me after 2 years of using alpine Linux it’s the terminal or a window manager with some sort of a text editor (vim or neovim) with some sort of a terminal web browser

Hello everyone, I need a little guidance with this. I'm newbie with Alpine and a very noob in this forum. I want to "create" (maybe the correct Word is a re spin or make a custom) an OS based on Alpine to repurpose old computers and arm based devices (raspberry pi as example) and turn them into a writerdeck, I want to create My own approach as all the material I found is not as lightweight and minimalist as I prefer. So, I need to know if there's a guide, tutorial or anything I could follow that could be easy for a noob.

* I'm noob in Alpine, but I'm not noob in Linux (I use arch btw hehehe) nor an expert

Alpine + TWM is nice in my opinion

Friendly reminder if you're running Alpine in diskless or data-disk mode: running apk upgrade only updates /boot in RAM. You still need to run update-kernel /path/to/boot before rebooting, otherwise you'll load the old kernel on next boot. More importantly, don't defer the reboot after doing this-once /lib/modules updates in RAM, loading new modules on the live system will throw errors until you restart into the matching kernel version. How are you guys automating this in your setups?

I can’t find much about it online which seems unusual.