Originally learned about Alpine as a base image for Docker, but now I pretty much use Alpine for all "Raspberry Pi and Friends" projects.<p>Since it runs entirely out of ram by default, it solves a lot of issues with having to "safe shutdown" these computers.<p>My only complaint is that it's difficult to "pre-bake" the Raspberry Pi images, through something like CI.
I tried Alpine as my desktop around 4 months ago, but the documentation felt very insufficient. Just to install Firefox I had to change my repository URLs, and this wasn't mentioned anywhere, I only found out when I searched for the Firefox package to see where it is- "testing".<p>Furthermore the built-in Lynx does not have HTTPS support, so you cannot read "How to get regular stuff working"[0] before magically switching to the testing repository and installing Firefox. Not to mention that article is essential if you want to compile Lynx with HTTPS enabled. (the gcc pkg is not dependent on build-base and just doing apk install gcc won't result in a working gcc)<p>Having said that, the choices of OpenRC over systemd, busybox ash over [insert bloated shell here] and musl-libc over glibc are remarkable. Also xorg-base-install(or something like that) and similar scripts are very useful and definitely helped me get going.<p>0: <a href="https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/How_to_get_regular_stuff_working" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/How_to_get_regular_stuff_w...</a>