I use Alpine Linux for my two Rasberry Pi servers and for my laptop with Sway. I enjoy it a lot. The setup scripts are quite nice to work with.
Documentation is decent but I found myself supplementing the Alpine wiki with the Gentoo and Arch wikis.
Building a system from the minimal starting point felt quite rewarding and I really enjoy tinkering with it still. Learning to script for ash has been quite the experience too.
I used to work as an electrician in the automation industry (robots that welded the frame of automobiles) but I was only an apprentice. I worked alongside robot and PLC programmers and absorbed information through them. I lost the motivation to finish my apprenticeship due to a changed perspective on the harmful affects of too much progress. That was as close as I got to any coding.
I decided to enjoy a mid-life retirement after protesting my way into getting fired which gave me time to explore hobbies. Along the way I ended up buying a used Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 and found some joy in both self hosting and shell scripting. Fortunately shell scripting supplements self hosting. I have been slowly crafting a low resource, low maintenance, minimal server.
Both Pi’s run Alpine Linux, the Pi 4 is dedicated to HomeAssistant which controls a handful of lights and switches. The Pi 5 runs Caddy and Kiwix. Right now it just hosts a bunch of wikis and a static file server with Caddy. Eventually I plan to run a blog created only by a single Bash script.
This is all completely outside of any workplace skill and I think I’d like to keep it that way. Programming for money would likely kill the wonder I still have for computers.