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So a while ago I was getting kind of bored of Gentoo (already!), and wanted to get a new operating system.
At first I tried FreeBSD but there was errors that kept showing up which I think were because of the wifi, so then I tried Void Linux but it also had problems like a random issue with LUKS (probally my own fault) but anyway I eventually decided to try Alpine Linux and this article is a little review of it.
Alpine Linux is very minimal using OpenRC instead of systemd, musl instead of glibc and it also has a very small download size (for the standard x86_64 download it is only 207 MB!).
Alpine Linux comes with a set of scripts to setup stuff and one of those scripts is setup-alpine which is a simple text based installer script.
Alpine Linux is very easy to install with setup-alpine it just asks you questions e.g. timezone, hard drive installation method (it can do LUKS and run on diskless mode (on ram)) and apk (the package manager) mirrors.
After the installation setting stuff up is fairly easy and it also has a script to setup a desktop enviorment which might be useful for some people - I use window managers (recently started using bspwm instead of i3).
Its package manager apk is extremely fast and trust me I'm not exagerating, you just have to try it for yourself (it's faster even than pacman!).
One reason for this speed is probally because that packages are compiled very minimally - therefore being faster.
musl is very nice but with its minimalism means that some packages don't work with it so you have to use a chroot or flatpak which is a bit of a pain.
And another shortcoming is that its not tailored for desktop use so it is not the priority so the documentation and such isn't the best for desktop usage/applications.
Unfortunatly as mentioned above, it's documentation is not the best - missing a bit of stuff but still pretty good.
So all in all Alpine Linux is a good unique Linux distribution even with its shortcomings, its been working very well and I use it on my main laptop and also on an all-in-one computer.
Thanks for reading, contact me to let me know your thoughts, bye!