Is Alpine Linux a Good Choice for Development?

Using Alpine for development is totally possible, and some people make it work well. But don’t kid yourself thinking it makes your workstation significantly more secure—realistically, you're better off with a robust router and a firewall. If you really want an elegant lightweight option, I'd recommend checking out distributions like Void Linux, which supports both musl and glibc.

From my experience, Alpine isn't the most straightforward choice for coding. It's designed more for specific uses rather than a general workstation setup. If coding is your main goal, I'd suggest going for something like Debian or Arch—those distributions have a larger community and more resources available if you run into issues.

Alpine Linux certainly has its perks like being ultra-light and secure, but one major downside is the lack of the glibc library since it uses musl instead. This can create compatibility issues for some software. Still, if you're okay with a bit of a learning curve, it’s a reliable and manual system that can be rewarding once you get the hang of it. Just keep in mind that it's more of a specialist OS, so anything outside its design can become challenging.

Alpine can be a fantastic environment for development due to its minimal design and security features. However, the absence of essential tools like GCC can complicate things. It has LLVM/Clang, but if your goal is to write code rather than tinker with your setup, you might want to stick with a more mainstream distro like Ubuntu or Fedora. They’re well-supported and make coding much smoother.