Half an year on Alpine: just musl aside

Summary

Half an year on Alpine: just musl aside 2025-08-31 20:05:26 Warning: Contains tongue-in-cheek language that might feel provocative if you have invested part of your identity into your software choices. For roughly six months now, I’ve been running Alpine on my laptop as a daily driver. Before that, I was running Void. I like how blazing fast Void is to start up and shut down, has an excellent package management system and its init system, runit, is beautifully integrated. Alpine also fits this description. When I first learned about Void, I read it described itself as “rolling but stable”, meaning you get new package versions often, but not to the point of breakage. While I never had an upgrade break a system, it still bothered me to upgrade and suddenly have sound or Bluetooth not work anymore, or have the system Python version change frequently, leading to all sorts of complaints from this or that application I didn’t even know was a Python program. I wanted to go back to a more stable distribution, but I also wanted a simpler, faster init system than systemd. Alpine, which has fixed releases every six months, eventually rose as an alternative. Expand for an overly detailed rundown of how I narrowed down my options How many options, really? Preferably not rolling. Preferably without systemd. At first glance it may seem like the choices of operating systems and distributions are endless, but turns out these two requirements are enough to nearly wipe them out. My main reason to not like systemd is not that I believe Red Hat is involved in a deep state conspiracy to turn frogs gay. In fact, I’d take systemd over SysV-style init on a heartbeat. What I prefer are the sweet spots between them, not the regression into the previous mess. My reasoning is actually mostly around speed. Call me impatient, and I know it can be tweaked to improve this, but I don’t like it when a machine is coming up or going down and you get a timer from some random process saying it will wait ...