All the programs I wanted were either in one of the Alpine repos or just not available for Linux at all, so in that regard for me Alpine wasn't a worse option than any other distro.
The only thing I encountered that would make me hesitate to recommend it to a newcomer is the installation. It's not hard. It's a lot of pressing Enter to accept the default options. They're mostly fine. It just looks like you're installing something from 1985. A lot of people are going to look at it and they're not even going to try. But once it's installed it looks like every other distro. In no time I was posting on Allspark with YouTube playing in another tab, and I was happy.
The only thing I encountered that would make me hesitate to recommend it to a newcomer is the installation. It's not hard. It's a lot of pressing Enter to accept the default options. They're mostly fine. It just looks like you're installing something from 1985. A lot of people are going to look at it and they're not even going to try. But once it's installed it looks like every other distro. In no time I was posting on Allspark with YouTube playing in another tab, and I was happy.