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.

The main things that have tripped me up:

• Remembering which set of commands I need to manage daemons. (openrc vs. system vs. systemctl vs…)*
• Remembering that apk uses add instead of install.
• Occasional compatibility issues when building (or trying to run precompiled) third-party software that doesn’t work well with musl.

On the last one, the two that stick in my mind are a bug where super-long threads crashed Snac on musl systems (the dev ended up adding a configurable limit to how far back it would try to fetch) and being unable to run Servo on a desktop VM I’ve been using for testing.