Alpine is a solid distro for servers from my experience.
The only bad experiences I've had with it, come from the lack of parity between the x86_64 and aarch64 virt images. So our x86_64 setup doesn't work without building our own image with kernel params and addons. Even ZFS I don't think is built into the virt-aarch64 image.
All in all, I would recommend more devs/sysadmins to try alpine outside the container world, and run it in test VMs, host servers, etc.
Yes, when using Alpine in a container context you're getting the "MINI ROOT FILESYSTEM" [1] experience; the parity differences are in the kernel (they're easily ""fixable"" and the team is open to enabling things that people actually use, I've opened such issues on their GitLab and they're very active and friendly)
The only bad experiences I've had with it, come from the lack of parity between the x86_64 and aarch64 virt images. So our x86_64 setup doesn't work without building our own image with kernel params and addons. Even ZFS I don't think is built into the virt-aarch64 image.
All in all, I would recommend more devs/sysadmins to try alpine outside the container world, and run it in test VMs, host servers, etc.