Raspbian, a Debian Linux derivative, is the standard operating choice on a Raspberry Pi, developed and recommended by the makers of the device. As someone who always favored Debian and sometimes its derivatives as well, I never gave much thoughts to alternatives on this platform.
When Docker emerged, I started noticing Alpine Linux, because it was a popular choice for small images, and I started using it for my own images. I always thought that Alpine is a child of container architecture, but the distribution is actually twice as old as Docker, and still a couple of years older than the concept of containers on Linux.
The lean base system with nothing but essentials reminded me a lot of Damn Small Linux, which used to be only 50 MiB in size and fit neatly on my very first USB flash drive, while still leaving space for some documents and MP3s. Still, I only ever thought of it as a container operating system, intended to run a single task and maybe some related activities.
Turns out Alpine has first class support for all generations of Raspberry Pi. So, as part of my ongoing quest for the perfect one second boot setup, I gave it a spin on a Raspberry Pi 5.
The verdict🔗
I want fast boot times, so I didn’t content with SD card booting, but added an NVMe+PoE HAT with an SSD, accidentally also covering out-of-the-box compatibility with more or less exotic peripherals, which tend to work relatively well with Raspbian.
To my big surprise, things just worked.
- The Alpine setup helpers did everything just right so the Pi’s bootloader would detect the bootable OS on the SSD.
- All the hardware worked out of the box.
- No fiddling with the software necessary.
The maturity and usability of Alpine is impressive, and I felt no effects from glibc having been replaced with musl.
What’s next?🔗
I’m still far from achieving 1 second boot time, but the Pi’s lean firmware makes it a little easier than with bulky UEFI of consumer laptops.
I should definitely give Alpine a spin with some lean window manager on my old 2017 Dell XPS, which is starting to feel sluggish with flashy modern Wayland desktop environments like Plasma.