As a long time Alpine user (bare metal, laptop, pi, servers) I can praise the low memory footprint, simple and consistent configuration and up-to-date packages.

As a long time Alpine user (bare metal, laptop, pi, servers) I can praise the low memory footprint, simple and consistent configuration and up-to-date packages. Alpine runs great on older hardware. Things that bugged me over the years are the lack of armv5 support (understandably an architecture that is dying) and that their native firewall awall is somewhat limited. Despite being a pleasure to use awall with iptables, it is not capable of nftables exclusive features (eg cake) as far as I understand, yet. The lack of obscure packages in Alpines repositories is not really an issue in my scenario. Or compiling against musl. Neither is the mentioned DNS over TCP issue. Using wlroots and sway is a breeze on Alpine and having moved from gentoo > arch > alpine over the years, I am glad Alpine exists. Second choice for me is Void Linux musl and their optional armv5 support via xbps-src. I hope Alpine will stick around and is not only known to be slim in docker containers.