Review: Alpine Linux 3.17.2
Something which regularly floated through my mind while using Alpine Linux was this experience reminded me of why I started using Linux regularly in the first place, back in the 1990s. Back then, when Windows 98 was king of the desktop market, I was running a minimal Linux distribution at home. The Linux experience was unusually light, clean, flexible, and transparent. It was something I could examine, tweak, and it just did what I told it to do, nothing more or less. There was a pleasant simplicity to the experience.
Alpine Linux is like that. It's small, light, and super fast. There are utilities which make the system easier to use (such as the APK package manager and OpenRC), but these tools just perform one task - well and quickly. They don't try to add a lot of features or guess what I want them to do. Alpine has an unusually clean design while also supplying tools to make our lives easier.