I mainly chose Alpine because of my horrible hardware, I only have 4gb of ram and a Haswell Celeron so I wanted something really light while still being usable. As for what I was using before it was Debian but I have jumped around a lot, Arch, Debian, Fedora, Mint, FreeBSD, etc.
Understandable. I also had a weaker PC until recently and love what Linux was able to do with it even though I haven't personally tested Alpine. Your rice is also really beautiful for such a minimal system.
Treating me very well so far, very lightweight since it's not using gnu coreutils or systemd. As for the setup they have a very well-put-together installer script just boot, log into root, type setup-alpine and follow the steps on screen, I think they also have a setup script for a bunch of desktop environments but I chose to install mine manually, although this was still very easy because of the surprisingly good documentation especially the wiki with many entries explaining step by step how to install different desktop environments, this combined with the verrryyy fast package manager makes for a great experience even on the desktop. :)
Pretty good distro, tbh. Should be a pleasant experience if you don't hesitate to dig into packaging software or use flatpak occasionally: I've used it for a short while, but switched due to quite small number of packages in the repos.
Question though. When I use Xfce, I don't have a network monitor in my systray. What did you install to make this work? Or did you jus use the setup-desktop script?
Clean, looks great! I'm curious is this more lightweight than xfce mint (my prefered choice to bring back some life to old notebooks)? If it is why? I understand alpine is best choice to build light container images but I don't know how it behave as desktop
i think it is lighter than Mint (Xfce) but i havent used Mint (Xfce) so i dont know how much lighter it is exactly, but it uses musl libc which has a much lighter and cleaner code base than glibc and it uses busybox coreutils instead of GNU coreutils and they are again much lighter it is also using OpenRC instead of SystemD for its init system