A look at Alpine Linux

27 June 2026

Alpine Linux is one of those distributions whose development I watch idly. Being bored lately, I decided to give the latest version a try (3.24.1 as of this writing).

Alpine is a no-nonsense, to-the-point distribution; in this sense it reminds me of OpenBSD. The installation process and official documentation also give off similar vibes. In fact I've seen them compared before. Some Linux experience is needed.

The default setup is very barebones, meant as a starting point for virtual machines or containers. In fact the CD image for the Virtual edition is under 70 megabytes! There's a setup-desktop script to run after install, which does just what the name implies, but I had no luck getting X.org to work. However running Qemu with the default graphics adapter (as opposed to the VMWare one) resulted in Alpine having a roomy framebuffer console that makes it comfortable to just work in text mode.

Notes:

• the Alpine installer uses the whole disk and only sets up one big root partition outside of swap and /boot
• Alpine uses doas (instead of the classic sudo), correctly configured out of the box

Tips:

• there are fewer than six thousand packages in the main repository; enable "community" to get over 28K
  • notably, the community packages are vetted and should be safe enough
• the man utility is in the mandoc package
  • the apk package manager has no man page
• compiler tools are in build-base

Issues:

• the default Lynx configuration is broken
• running chsh without arguments will only ever offer /bin/sh no matter what others are installed
  • however you can set any shell listed in /etc/shells with chsh -s

Alpine has a fast release cycle, and apps are kept very much up to date. Adventurous people can upgrade to the "edge" branch, which works on a rolling-release basis. Otherwise, it's even been called a boring distro, in the good sense: it gets the job done and there's not much to say about it. Usually, anyway. Sure enough, release notes for each new version tend to be laconic and technical.

On this note, I'll add more details after clocking more than a day on Alpine. Cheers.