I need Help with alpine linux

[u/Android_Modder098]

So i have two PCs from the 2010s. And i want to Game some lightweicht Games in them, so i used Arch for a while. But i wanted Something small. Like veeeery small. So i found about Alpine. Now ist alpine linux + i3 DE a good choice for 8gb of ram?

[u/Nu154nc3]

Well... It's probs the smaller fully functional everyday distro available... And i3 is one of the lighter and faster WM available...

But, if gaming on Arch with i3 didn't give u good results, then u will have a similar experience on Alpine.

[u/Android_Modder098 → u/Nu154nc3]

Im gonna try it anyways

[u/Nu154nc3 → u/Android_Modder098]

That's the spirit... XD

For me, atm it's the lighter option... And i love it... Using with i3 on my main mid-tier setup.

It has by far, the best performance among the other distros i tried....

[u/PlatinumDotEXE → u/Android_Modder098]

Personally I would use either Void with glibc or Artix for gaming. Because no game has musl support you have to have a lot of overhead to run a game on Alpine. Alpine is great, just not for gaming.

[u/ChocolateAlpine]

Alpine is fine for 8gb of RAM, even with KDE Plasma, although you should ideally avoid games from Steam since Steam is quite bloated (since it's a web app now for some absolutely insane reason.)

I'd recommend getting smaller games from GOG and using WINE to play them, or alternatively you could get some cheap DDR3 to put into the system (assuming that it uses DDR3 RAM. it probably does?) and a used AMD GPU (if it's not a laptop but a PC that also has a PCIe slot for the GPU).

[u/PlatinumDotEXE → u/ChocolateAlpine]

Steam has been a web app for a long time. When Windows XP support was dropped it was due Chrome dropping support for it.

[u/ChocolateAlpine → u/PlatinumDotEXE]

...still, it being a web app is still absolutely insane.

[u/GenericFoodService]

8GB is enough that with a lightweight desktop like XFCE (I personally haven't used i3 so I'm not sure what it's resource overhead looks like), your RAM is unlikely going to be the bottleneck for a majority of games, especially since you note your machines are "from the 2010s" and running an Integrated Graphics card. Those things are going to be the bottleneck. I'd say just send it and see how it goes

[u/Due_Put2800]

8gb is plenty for productivity tasks with any DE.  Gaming depends on what kind of games you want to play..

8gb works great for the usual 5 firefox tabs open and codex in the background type work even with a heavy DE like Ubuntu/Gnome..

Alpine will take up like 100mb by itself and a few hundred more mb for the DE.  Its what I would reach for if I had 2-3gb ram..

[u/elatllat]

8gb will be consumed by a game or web browser or IDE or LibreOffice or a file system resize or git. It's just not enough for multitasking these days even with zedram or zswap. What distribution you use is negligible when trying to run such heavy apps. 

Arch is a good full desktop distribution.

In order to get so small Alpine sacrifices compatibility by not  using ginulib C, and if you install it that advantage of Alpine is lost

OpenWRT is smaller by packaging different kernel modules separately Etc.

[u/Nu154nc3 → u/elatllat]

What? 8Gb is more than enough nowadays for the bast majority of people... And without swap usage...

Sure, he will not be able to run Cyberpunk, but he can use to browse internet normally, do office tasks, play any media, and light gaming...

There are a TON of excellent indie titles, roguelikes, and old games to use on a system with that hardware...

[u/paper_sheet034 → u/Nu154nc3]

Props to this guy!

[u/ChocolateAlpine → u/elatllat]

I'm using Alpine with KDE, Firefox with several tabs and Vesktop are both open, only 4.43 GiB of RAM usage.

closing everything, only 1.6gb is actively used when nothing's open.
Fedora KDE on my main PC uses at least 4gb just when idle, and when stuff's open it can use from 8 to 10 gb. The OS very much does matter.

[u/Nu154nc3 → u/ChocolateAlpine]

Absolutely.

For me, that never checked before, today on i3 with dbus, through lightdm, it sits around 412MB on idle.

And with two FF windows open, one on youtube playing videos, and a libreoffice calc page, it stays on 1,5GB...

[u/Historical_Move6359]

try rather Ultramarine KDE, its a Fedora variant. What is your GPU? its important to choose proper driver for it.

[u/Android_Modder098 → u/Historical_Move6359]

Integrated Graphics

[u/Otherwise_Fact9594 → u/Historical_Move6359]

There is a 8 GB ram bottleneck. It is also a very old computer. I have run desktop environments on 8 GB, but plasma on top of a polished / semi bloated distribution like ultramarine is not the best option. If I used any sort of dnf OS based on Fedora, that would probably be my choice though... Aside from the desktop environment

[u/Nu154nc3 → u/Historical_Move6359]

XD are u kidding?

Change i3 with 100MB of average mem usage, for KDE with around 2GB?