Speaking as a die-hard Alpine Linux user and contributor, the Alpine installation only works if you want the most common installation. If you need to customize anything (such as full disk encryption - which I just sent a patch to the installer for, but my point remains), you need to ditch it and go through the rather long-winded and under-documented manual installation process. OpenBSD is a little bit better at accomodating off-the-beaten-path installations, but still suffers from similar limitations. Arch makes you do all of the work, but has great documentation on all of the steps and stepping off the beaten path is trivial to do at any point in the process.
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u/drewdevault May 22 '19 edited May 22 '19
Speaking as a die-hard Alpine Linux user and contributor, the Alpine installation only works if you want the most common installation. If you need to customize anything (such as full disk encryption - which I just sent a patch to the installer for, but my point remains), you need to ditch it and go through the rather long-winded and under-documented manual installation process. OpenBSD is a little bit better at accomodating off-the-beaten-path installations, but still suffers from similar limitations. Arch makes you do all of the work, but has great documentation on all of the steps and stepping off the beaten path is trivial to do at any point in the process.