My home server has been running alpine for a while now. I'm always delighted with how simple and robust it is. Not that this is probably recommended, but I have a cron script that checks for upgradable packages every night and automatically installs them. It has always been seamless. My family uses this server throughout the day, and the only daytime down-time has been due to power outages. (In some way the reliability is an issue because it enables me being lazy with backup testing).

For a little home-server, I am in love with the KISS-ness of Alpine.

Alpine is a good system for the boot/main rootfs because it's rock solid and has the most recent kernel. When glibc is required or when you just want to access the repositories of other distros you can unshare and pivot_root into the respective rootfs (using bubblewrap). There is also flatpak (uses bubblewrap internally).

You can also go the extra mile and use bubblewrap to initialize the desired mount environment and then enter a sandbox from it using virtualization (/dev/kvm). Some VMM's such as muvm[1] even allow for hardware acceleration and performant Wayland pass-through.

[1] <https://github.com/AsahiLinux/muvm>

This project aims to do exactly what I described but defaults to Nix: <https://git.clan.lol/clan/munix>

Upgraded two of my HTTPS nodes, nothing went boom. Also upgrade and rebooted home physical firewall/router, works fine. DoH listener in Unbound working fine. Upgraded authoritative DNS server, works fine.

    nginx version: nginx/1.30.2
    built by gcc 15.2.0 (Alpine 15.2.0) 
    built with OpenSSL 3.5.6 7 Apr 2026

    Unbound Version 1.25.1
    Linked libs: libevent 2.1.12-stable (it uses epoll), OpenSSL 3.5.6 7 Apr 2026
    Linked modules: dns64 cachedb subnetcache respip validator iterator

    chronyd (chrony) version 4.8 (+CMDMON +REFCLOCK +RTC +PRIVDROP +SCFILTER +SIGND -NTS -SECHASH +IPV6 -DEBUG)

    HAProxy version 3.4.0-64a335366 2026/06/03 - https://haproxy.org/
    Status: long-term supported branch - will stop receiving fixes around Q2 2031.

    NSD version 4.14.2

Alpine is my go-to nowadays for everything in my homelab except desktop (I use Void btw), because of how dirty the setup to make GPU's work with musl kernel.

What a beautiful little thing Alpine is.

I know that Alpine has a package manager but I haven't tried it because I worry that Musl might present problems compiling software (I sometimes like to compile things myself, like Vim or Emacs). Is this worry valid?

Also are there any issues compiling Go and Rust programs on Alpine?

Is azure Linux still alpine, or is it a full fork now?