Alpine.

I’m a longtime Arch user, and would have preferred to use Arch on a particular system, but didn’t want to deal with needing to babysit ZFS packages from AUR.

So, I decided to use Alpine after never having tried it before, and ended up sticking with it. Like Arch, it’s both lightweight and has a capable/sensible package manager, which are the main things that are important to me.

I haven’t had any growing pains from Alpine’s use of busybox/musl/openrc, things mostly Just Work!

I self-host https://miniflux.app/ and it has been working great for my needs.

I’m curious if anyone dailies Alpine for desktop use. (I don’t.)

This is what I use, will work with any filesystem (it writes hashes in hidden/dot files) and on any OS as long as Python is available: https://pypi.org/project/chkbit/

It runs ahead of my nightly backup. If it fails, the backup won’t proceed.

Edit: Because the script relies on hashing files, it uses tons of both disk IO and CPU when it runs, but the tradeoff is worthwhile to me.

Nightly automated runs of the chkbit script is the only thing that alerted me to the fact that either the SSD or storage controller in my Mac Mini had issues and was corrupting data. I was very thankful to have already had the automation in place for that exact scenario.

It theoretically shouldn’t be necessary for filesystems that have built-in checksumming.