Does anyone know if Alpine will run on a Surface Pro 3. I have one running Linux Mint, and Mint runs pretty well out of the box. Touch, wifi and camera work. However, I'm interested in trying the Alpine distro. Thanks in advance for any comments and suggestions.

I initially wanted to post this on the old Chimera Linux subreddit because I had a question about the Video Games page, but since it's discontinued and Alpine Linux also uses musl libc, I believe this is the ideal place.

Anyway, on Chimera Linux, I had many problems trying to run Minecraft (without Flatpak). Chimera has PrismLauncher in its repositories, but it says it needs to use a glibc compatibility layer for musl libc. This confuses me a lot because PrismLauncher is available for FreeBSD (which uses a completely different libc), and it doesn't need compatibility layers; it's all native. Why can't I run Minecraft without compatibility layers? Or is this just a problem in Chimera Linux that Alpine Linux has resolved?

I know that the reason stated on the page I mentioned is: "As Minecraft comes with native binaries built for Glibc in its packaging," but isn't the game in Java? Even if C/C++ binaries existed, wouldn't it be possible to compile them with musl?

Hi everyone.

I want to show you a project that honestly makes me a bit embarrassed to share, just because it's the first time I share something with the general public. But I think it might be useful to someone, so here it goes.

I collaborate on a project called Neko Void, specifically I got interested in the part that makes Neko Void images for musl, for the musl C library. And we all know how it is: stuff made for glibc doesn't work on musl, you have to rebuild it. And proprietary software is basically impossible to rebuild because the source isn't free. As a result, on Alpine/musl most proprietary apps just don't work. Practically 100% of closed-source programs fail. Steam doesn't work by default either, and well, that's what makes most users run away.

I've been working on a solution. There are many alternatives to run glibc stuff on musl distros. One is using AppImage, which bundles glibc inside, but it has a problem: when you have many apps packaged as AppImage, dependencies get repeated over and over and in the long run it gets really heavy. Another alternative I tried was installing Nix as a separate subsystem, but it's extremely heavy even if things run natively.

My goal when I started this was to make proprietary apps run in the fastest and lightest way possible, using as little space as possible, without duplicating dependencies like Flatpak does. So I made arxy, which is a very basic and simple project. It's an Arch rootfs that gets mounted so you can install whatever you want on it. It's optimized to weigh as little as possible, but it keeps enough so most Arch packages, if not 100%, work correctly on any existing Linux distro, including Alpine. And best of all, it keeps AUR access.

The process it uses is pretty simple. It mounts the image with bwrap and if that's not available, it uses a basic chroot. And it has very simple commands, like arxy install <package> or arxy update. In short, it installs any app directly from the official Arch repos or from the AUR in a small subsystem, sharing drivers, kernel and other things, so it runs as native and direct as possible. By using Arch's own package manager, there's no dependency duplication, because packages naturally share dependencies. So you can install here everything you'd install via Flatpak, but saving space and running better. The program creates shortcuts for the apps on your desktop normally and they open normally.

As I said, it's one of the first projects I've worked on and I've put a lot of my time into it, and I'd love for you to take a look. I'm still learning, so I really invite anyone who can to collaborate. Any feedback is totally welcome. The project is made to work on any distro, but I personally tested it on Alpine Linux, Chimera Linux and Void Linux, both glibc and musl. I invite you to try it on other distros and well, I hope you like it.

Repo: https://github.com/SrDicov/arxy

For Alpine users specifically: how do you currently deal with closed-source / glibc-only apps on Alpine? I'd love to hear what breaks for you and if this approach helps.

Just curious, for those using Alpine Linux, how much RAM and disk space does it usually use after a fresh install?

Also wondering about idle CPU usage. Is it really that lightweight compared to other Linux distros?

Just trying to get an idea before I install it on an old/low-spec machine.

I want to try Alpine Linux, but the installation process looks a bit intimidating.

Is there a simple/easy way to install it, especially for someone who’s not that familiar with Alpine yet?

A day ago, I installed Alpine 3.24 on an old laptop in a dual-boot setup with Debian 13. Before this, I had only used Alpine in VMs. I had to copy the firmware files for the Broadcom b43 Wi-Fi card from Debian 13, but now everything works. The system is very responsive, and apk is the fastest package manager I’ve ever seen. Firefox is sandboxed (bubblewrap). What can I say? For me, it’s an almost perfect system. Everything I need is in the repositories. And the most important point: it’s Hardened Linux. It’s like the "OpenBSD" of the Linux world. Viva Alpine Linux!

P/s Don't give me too much grief about the DE; GNOME was a deliberate choice. I really like Xfce, but 2026 now))

I have recently installed alpine-standard-3.24.2-x86_64 on a Dell/Wyse thin client.
Networking, including DNS, is operational. I've installed the GNOME graphics package, which operates properly for the most part.

I can list the applications with "apk -v version". But when I open the "Software" app and click the "Updates" tab, it shows "No Connection."

Suggestions?

So it wasn't exactly a hard fix(*) but it really confused me... why wouldn't it just... copy over the Wi-Fi firmware to the installation from the installer or install the appropriate firmware from the package manager? (I'm a bit of a noob, though, my reasoning could just be flawed)

(*) I chrooted onto the installation from the installer, which had working Wifi firmware and then simply installed the firmware from the repos

Alpine Linux
Base Ram usage : 250 mib
tuff
mango tuff wm

I've been exploring setups for self-hosted AI, and I’m curious how practical Alpine really is, especially if you're trying to keep everything as minimal as possible.

A few days ago I stumbled upon LM-Kit while researching local AI runtimes. It handles things like models, RAG workflows, document processing, and AI agents, so I started wondering how well that kind of setup would work in an Alpine environment.

If you’ve actually tried running AI services on Alpine Linux, what did you find when it came to handling dependencies? How were issues with musl libc compatibility?. What about GPU support? Does it play nice with tools like CUDA or ROCm, or does it get tricky?

I’d love to hear experiences from people who have gone this route

I am trying to dual boot Alpine Linux with Linux Mint in my laptop. My disk has three partitions, one is free and i want to install Alpine Linux on there. But when i type "alpine-setup" and i have to choose the site where i want to install Alpine Linux the software does not recognizes the partitions and just recognizes the whole disk. Is there some bug related to this or i am making something wrong?

Hi! I have a Pi running alpine diskless and every reboot i get an error with apk on upgrade operations, like

apk upgrade -vvv After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used. 1 error; 157 packages, 644 dirs, 6049 files, 342.7 MiB

I run apk fix and it isn't clear what exactly is causing the error so I can mitigate it properly, no mater the verbose flags used

apk fix (1/1) Reinstalling i2pd@edgecommunity (2.60.0-r1) Installing file to etc/i2pd/i2pd.conf.apk-new Installing file to etc/i2pd/tunnels.conf.apk-new Executing busybox-1.37.0-r31.trigger OK: 342.7 MiB in 157 packages

Then the error vanishes until the next reboot.

How can I properly diagnose this?

without this driver i cant use laptop (currently i use void but i also want try alpine thats i cant use bc no wifi)

i could not find this driver in repo

So i saw a video about how a guy downloaded and run alpine, and i tough to myself "What if i will swicth to alpine, like i can use the Wikipedia to download the distro, sooo what do you guys think.

I use a low end computer levovo computer for 2014 and it used to have 2 gigs of tam but i changed it to 4 by myself.

And am a 15 year old

And i know how to boot a laptop of course.

I don't think this is as necessary but it's a great thing to have and mention no? From my past experience dinit is the fastest init I've ever used, it's simple and cheap to run. While dinit is available on the repository it's a manual configuration, you have to set it up one by one to boot up your system. What I imagine is a automated dinit setup so it can change openrc without messing with manual install or a native dinit from the installer(iso file) like other distros, I mean putting a dinit option for alpine Linux is revolutionary. Therefore, a dinit version of alpine will be a great choice that company openrc version. Making it much faster, cheaper, modern, and a substitute for Chimera Linux.

Finally after a long day i installed alpine linux , this is more experimental because i installed it on a usb but still..

I am running pi-hole with unbound on alpine 3.24.2 and was wondering what is the process to update/upgrade pi-hole to the latest version Pi-hole FTL v6.7.1, Web v6.6 and Core v6.4.3 Released, Their are some serious security fixes that are included in these update. I tried apk update then apk upgrade but Pi-hole is still on 6.4, how do I upgrade pi-hole.

I used to just apk update, apk upgrade and newer kernels would just upgrade easily. Now, I can't do that, I am very storage constrained only, kernel updates take 500MB at least. Which I don't have the luxury in my spesific case. Why the sudden change of kernel update mechanism?

I finally installed Alpine, ngl, it was kinda daunting because I did a complete manual install without using the "setup-*" at all. I'm really happy I got it to work, can't count the number of times I repartitioned my drive until I achieved a flawless install. Next is setting up dwl. I love minimal system.

Custom init, custom kernel, internet works

Launching Alpine VMs takes only one additional step vs using Debain or other marketplace VMs. The benefits are less wasted RAM, and more stable instances that avoid background telemetry and unnecessary "agent" activity.

1. Download the cloud image to a bucket

2. Create a custom vm image

     gcloud compute images create alpine-3-24-base \
        --source-uri="gs://goscore-dev-ops/images/gcp_alpine-3.24.1-x86_64-bios-cloudinit-r0.raw.tar.gz" \
        --family="alpine-linux" \
        --description="Alpine Linux 3.24 minimal cloud-init base image"

3. Launch!

    gcloud compute instances create alpine-vm-1\
        --project=goscore-dev \
        --zone=us-west1-b \
        --machine-type=e2-micro \
        --image=alpine-3-24-base \
        --metadata=ssh-keys="alpine:$(cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub)"

i am using a Lenovo ThinkPad l380. It works very well out of the box, i used the extended .ISO for my wlan0 WiFi card. I have an Intel Centrino 8265 WiFi card. Setup-desktop with gnome worked very well too. 10/10 Distribution would recommend.

After updating my three bare-metal Xen dom0 hosts to the latest Alpine linux-lts 6.18.52-r0 kernel, none of them booted successfully. They either black-screened before dom0 userspace/networking came up, or dropped into an incomplete boot environment depending on the boot artifacts used.