I ran two arch boxes for about 7 years, two years ago I got an X200 with libreboot and did not want systemd on it. I chose Alpine because it allows you to use musl libc, this was after fighting a bug in the gentoo build process. The idea is to understand exactly how my system boots up, so I can cut as much cruft from it as possible, and also for my system to boot up in the same order every time, something that in my experience maintaining several computers with systemd, causes a lot of problems with chasing down bugs (If the bugs are nonexistent half the time because the services boot up in almost-random order, how the hell can you debug it?!).
In my experience, it's extremely viable. Most things you can get away with pulling from the Alpine repos, everything else you can stick in a chroot (musl libc causes some problems with compatibility) or compile from source (Which is usually quicker than you'd think, except when C++ gets involved).
It's so much more stable than any other modern linux system I have run. Someone I know has a twin X230 with Manjaro on, and the boot-up time is so long. I managed to get my Alpine box to 40 seconds to gui, but was limited by the dhcp resolution and the pre-boot flashups. Manjaro takes about three or four minutes to get to the login screen, and then another minute or two to load the GUI.
My much more powerful arch box has about the same bootup times as the X230, even though theoretically I am using lighter technologies. Something I have noticed as well is that because of systemd running boot items concurrently, it actually ends up with a less deterministic boot. A lot of the times it simply fails to resolve wifi on boot (leading to a several minute hang), and the systemd logs and dmesg show absolutely nothing at fault.
In my experience, it's extremely viable. Most things you can get away with pulling from the Alpine repos, everything else you can stick in a chroot (musl libc causes some problems with compatibility) or compile from source (Which is usually quicker than you'd think, except when C++ gets involved).
It's so much more stable than any other modern linux system I have run. Someone I know has a twin X230 with Manjaro on, and the boot-up time is so long. I managed to get my Alpine box to 40 seconds to gui, but was limited by the dhcp resolution and the pre-boot flashups. Manjaro takes about three or four minutes to get to the login screen, and then another minute or two to load the GUI.
My much more powerful arch box has about the same bootup times as the X230, even though theoretically I am using lighter technologies. Something I have noticed as well is that because of systemd running boot items concurrently, it actually ends up with a less deterministic boot. A lot of the times it simply fails to resolve wifi on boot (leading to a several minute hang), and the systemd logs and dmesg show absolutely nothing at fault.