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Alpine Usage Log

I've spent a few weeks tikering with and contributing to Alpine Linux. Here are a few things I've learned along the way. It's on my laptops and server now and is quite a usable distribution, despite its differences from the mainstream.

The installer covers almost every use case. It's great. But you need to run it with `BOOT_SIZE=500` to get a decently sized /boot partition. Otherwise it's 100M! That's not enough to have multiple kernels, and kernel upgrades might get weird.
`setup-desktop` will get you a desktop out of the box. Do this after install.
most common desktop use cases can be covered by `setup-desktop`, but there are also lots of wiki pages for things like printing, laptop specific configuration, etc.
when the installer asks you about disks, choose crypt first, then lvm, then sys. That way you get LVM-on-LUKS.
It's possible to ctrl-c out of the installer where it starts asking you for disks, format the disks yourself, (encrypted BTRFS!) and run `setup-disk /mnt`, provided you have everything mounted correctly at /mnt.
The installer won't do a separate /home partition. If you want that, also use ROOT_SIZE=20480 or something.
it's possible to "tag" repos - in /etc/apk/repositories, put @tagname <url> to only allow installation when pkgname@tagname is specified. This is how I use testing repos on stable, and I have my own package mirror set up too.
packages have separate -dev and -doc packages for manpages. `apk add mandoc mandoc-apropos` will get you the man/apropos programs, and `apk add docs` is a metapackage for the -doc package for everything you install.

That's about it. Alpine is fantastic and I love it. It doesn't do a bunch of extra stuff that I don't really get, which is nice. No systemd and selinux, which, take it or leave it I guess? I think it's a nice change of pace for now. I miss how easy and well put together Fedora was (i.e. installing nagios package will get you a fully working nagios server, but in alpine you have to do configs) but I think this is better long-term. We'll see.

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