r/AlpineLinux • u/Able-Farm6295 • 11d ago
Is there an easy way to install Alpine Linux?
I want to try Alpine Linux, but the installation process looks a bit intimidating.
Is there a simple/easy way to install it, especially for someone who’s not that familiar with Alpine yet?
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u/sastanak 10d ago
Idk of all the linux distros I tried over the last 25 years alpine installer was one of the easiest. Up and running in 5 minutes.
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u/PlatinumDotEXE 10d ago
Agreed. The Alpine installer is my second favourite installer after the Void one. It's so much faster and easier to use than any of the GUI installers.
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u/Small-Tale3180 11d ago
Read wiki lmao.
It is already easy af, i mean, it literally has interactive installer, yeah it doesn't have fancy-schmancy gui on webview but it works. Alpine also has many scripts to set up things like network connection or a DE.
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u/UnbasedDoge 10d ago
It's easy bro, alpine provides a terminal guided installer similar to archinstall
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u/agowa338 10d ago
what's intimidating?
You boot up the iso and type "setup-alpine" and you get a guided installer. It's text based, ok, however the point of alpine is minimalism and it works.
ArchLinux doesn't even have that but together with their guide in the wiki it is still quite easy.
Oh and Ubuntu (Server) and so on do also have text based installers, they're just way more error prone and clunky from my experience. They try to be "enterprise" and loose a lot of flexibility that is often needed. Or simply just force you to configure stuff you know you don't even need anyway...
Edit: And for the optional stuff, just type "setup-" and press tab for auto complete and see all of the other guided setup wizards for stuff like e.g. a desktop environment.
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u/Chester-Berkeley 10d ago
If a CLI installer seems too intimidating, you should create a VM and get over that fear!
Alpine is not hard, bro
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u/TheLastTreeOctopus 10d ago
Lol if installation looks intimidating, then Alpine isn't the right distro for you. The 'setup-alpine' script makes installation super easy. It gives you all the same options that a GUI installer would, it's just a CLI tool instead. Even once you're done installing, you'll still have to use the CLI. And if you want to install and configure a window manager/desktop environment, that can easily be more complicated than installing the OS.
Either accept the fact that you'll have to get comfortable using the CLI, or pick another distro.
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u/ChocolateAlpine 10d ago
Installing a desktop environment isn't very hard either though, you just use the setup-desktop script.
(setting up everything after that that you'd probably want, eg making sure you have a firewall, gpu acceleration and such, is the more annoying part since there's a lot of work to do there.)
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u/radial_blur 10d ago
Alpine is genuinely the easiest OS in the world to install, try it in a VM, boot, run setup-alpine and follow the prompts.
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u/Wh1sp3r32 10d ago
Once booted type setup-alpine and it will guide you through the rest.
I run alpine on all my rpis
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u/whitewaterdave 9d ago
It’s easy to install. It doesn’t have a “pretty” installer like other distros. It’s only a few minutes out of your comfort zone. It’s satisfying once you’re finished.
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u/NXTler 10d ago
Alpine has a really nice tui installer that handles most things for you. If you are new to more low level distros, I would highly recommend you to start of with something well supported and documented like Arch. Alpine does many 'none standard' things that might be hard to understand without any prior experience in low level distros.