I have a Pi, which I currently use to host some services (pihole, ghostofolio, bookstack, vaultwarden, homepage, portainer and CASAOS). Now I have a small GigaByte Brix with an Intel N processor (2 cores), 8 GB of ram and 1Tb SSD. Works great, passive heatsink, zero noise.
I’m going to use it for Immich, and transfer from the Raspi VaultWarden and Ghostfolio and something else (maybe nextcloud).
I’ve been testing with Fedora Server, Debian, and Alpine Linux. In all three cases, you should always tap here and there to get the system “ready.” But for the “long term” it seems that Fedora is more solid, + it includes cockpit by default. I loved Alpine, it is simply fast, but it always requires more touch-ups. Debian seems, as we say in my country, “the known dog” but the apt system seems like a real mess to me.
Opinions? CasaOS will not be installed here.
Personally a huge fan of Alpine. It’s snappy as fuck. But you’re right about the startup cost. If you can get over than energy hump, go for it, given the low resources of a Pi compared to a traditional desktop.
Aside from the image size, is there any real performance benefit from alpine?
In my experience, definitely yes. Additionally, if you don’t like using busybox, you can install GNU tools with the package manager. After doing so, I didn’t really notice a speed change for the negative, so I just kept that as my defaults.