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.
I finally chose Fedora, although my heart was with Alpine-linux ๐
The reason. I used Fedora desktop for a long time, and it was the best user experience with Linux I had. I am currently with MacOs but I miss Fedora and GNOME (a lot). It is a robust distribution, with large support and a large amount of information on the web. Furthermore, the cockpit is quite useful to perform some tasks without depending on a terminal in case I need to access it from outside my local network. I think there was no wrong option as some have commented. Just a matter of personal taste.
Thanks all
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