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bea wrote

I guess I'm coming back from the dead to talk about how much I love Void and Alpine.

I've enjoyed using Void and Alpine both for around two and three years respectively with no issues after coming over from Antergos. Alpine for my server and Void on my laptop that I use pretty much daily. Alpine is great for small installs that take up very little space, Void has a much nicer package manager with a wider selection of packages though. Alpine is versioned but upgrading is as easy as changing the repository URL. Void is rolling release. They're both systemd-less and ( optionally ) musl libc based which is nice. I really dislike needless bloat and greatly prefer simplicity so these two systems let me get pretty close to my ideal without having to sink a lot of time into it and compile a bunch of stuff myself.

Regardless of what system you end up going with I hope you enjoy your new OS :)

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zzuum wrote

I could never install Alpine 😢 which is unfortunate because I really wanted to try it

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bea wrote

Admittedly it's a bit more complicated to setup Alpine for desktop use since it's so minimal and sadly lacks extensive documentation in this area, unlike Arch or Void.

I've only used it on my VPS and NAS+Home "server" and I suck at helping with tech stuff but what issues were you having?

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zzuum wrote

I just couldn't get Alpine to install with the docs supplied. It was so long ago. I'm not too good at going outside guidelines to solve computer specific issues.

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bea wrote

aw okie, yeah that's unfortunate

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kore wrote

I had a hell of a time trying to compile some software packages on musl alpine that I really wanted, primarily 3D printer software. Maybe I should give it another try with glibc. It was damn fast, particularly the package manager.

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bea wrote

Yeah sadly lots of software depends on glibc's extensions or implementation-defined ( and sometimes even undefined ) behavior and ignores C/POSIX conformance and portability. See: Musl: Possible problems
The solution to this is usually installing a glibc distro into a chroot if you can't patch the program to work with musl.

Btw you can't give it a try with glibc because Alpine is musl-only. I said "( optionally )" because Void is and didn't clarify for Alpine to keep it shorter, sorry.

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ziq wrote (edited )

You use Steam / Steam Play so you should stick with a mainstream distro - debian-based ones are most reliable with it. Still haven't found one I like more than KDE Neon.

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mofongo OP wrote

I like how Neon looks and I prefer KDE, but if like to try something outside my comfort zone before settling again.

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ramone wrote

I remember when slackware first came out with a multilib architecture that would support it. Still one of my favorite distros!

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puffin wrote

In my experience Linux Mint Debian Edition is relatively stable. Cinnamon DE has always been a pleasure to use.

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zzuum wrote

I've loved Ubuntu, and elementary the most. I've had bad luck with void, Alpine, and other complicated installs because I'm bad at maintenance.

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heckthepolice2 wrote

I've had bad luck with void, Alpine, and other complicated installs because I'm bad at maintenance.

Oh shit I just remembered I haven't updated my void install in like a month, thanks for the reminder

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mofongo OP wrote

I can defend myself on maintenance but I usually go Ubuntu because I don't want to deal with it.

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kore wrote

ah man this thread is making want to do an LFS build...

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jaidedctrl wrote

Yea, Fedora sounds like a good plan. If not that, maybe Arch/some Arch-based system.

It's good to get a taste of the different package managers and approaches available.

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