My frustration with Raspberry Pi OS is that the packages available were constantly out of date. Some were 2 to 3 years out of date.
I eventually started using Alpine linux on my Pi boards and have been happy since then. Now I can use the latest Docker and Podman packages without manually adding new repositories.
If I didn’t prefer Alpine’s minimal approach, I would have probably gone with Debian because of it’s history in stability.
I can appreciate that about Debian. Common tools and stability can be both convinient and reliable. Learning linux is already overwhelming with choices.
Even though I use Alpine for all my Pi boards and laptop, I keep a live usb partition of Linux Mint Debian Edition as my emergency backup. It just works.
I haven’t tried arch at all. I used Linux Mint for a year, LMDE for a year and only really started working with command line since last December. I think I chose to try Alpine because I wanted my web facing devices to have the least amount of software installed. Security-wise it made sense to me to have less surface area to exploit.
It took a bit extra effort for me to learn how to use OpenRC as the init system. As well as learning Linux from a bare bones linux perspective.
I actually found using Busy-box Ash interesting to work with and that’s the only shell I currently use. I even wrote a whole script around Rsync in a POSIX friendly way because I liked the idea portable scripting.
If you’re interested, I can send you a link that contains the setup notes for my server. It’s about 85% of my setup process, the rest being some files that are mostly customization that I rsync into place towards the end of the setup process. That can give you an idea of what Alpine on ARM is like.
My frustration with Raspberry Pi OS is that the packages available were constantly out of date. Some were 2 to 3 years out of date.
I eventually started using Alpine linux on my Pi boards and have been happy since then. Now I can use the latest Docker and Podman packages without manually adding new repositories.
If I didn’t prefer Alpine’s minimal approach, I would have probably gone with Debian because of it’s history in stability.
I believe you may have found your ideal OS. Debian will always lag behind ever so often. And that’s okay. We all use the Pi’s for different reasons.
I can appreciate that about Debian. Common tools and stability can be both convinient and reliable. Learning linux is already overwhelming with choices.
Even though I use Alpine for all my Pi boards and laptop, I keep a live usb partition of Linux Mint Debian Edition as my emergency backup. It just works.
I went with Arch Linux on ARM for a minimal approach - did you try that?
Genuninely interested in your experience of Alpine Linux as I’d not considered it on a Pi (only VMs so far…)
I haven’t tried arch at all. I used Linux Mint for a year, LMDE for a year and only really started working with command line since last December. I think I chose to try Alpine because I wanted my web facing devices to have the least amount of software installed. Security-wise it made sense to me to have less surface area to exploit.
It took a bit extra effort for me to learn how to use OpenRC as the init system. As well as learning Linux from a bare bones linux perspective.
I actually found using Busy-box Ash interesting to work with and that’s the only shell I currently use. I even wrote a whole script around Rsync in a POSIX friendly way because I liked the idea portable scripting.
If you’re interested, I can send you a link that contains the setup notes for my server. It’s about 85% of my setup process, the rest being some files that are mostly customization that I rsync into place towards the end of the setup process. That can give you an idea of what Alpine on ARM is like.