Alpine is an interesting choice for hosting, really curious what situation you’re hosting in that would require that level or lightness for a distro?

My favorite story about best buy is in the early 2000’s, a family member gifted me a $20 gift card to best buy, which unbeknownst to them, I had stopped shopping at because it got too expensive and I started buying from newegg instead. Anyway, I walk in and am thinking 'well I don’t really need anything big right now, like a full PC, laptop, etc. Maybe I’ll just get a DVD or something."

Even with a $20 gift card, Best buy prices were so marked up, they were either still more expensive, or the same price as other stores. I think other stores were selling DVD’s at like $15 (not new-releases) and best buy was $35. I walked out and never ended up buying anything. I’m shocked they’re still around to be honest.

I’m not sure I would agree for arch if the OP wants low maintenance. I’ve never run it myself, but the way I’ve heard arch described is the further you go without regular updates and the more likely you are to have a problem when you do update.

Aren’t most app configurations and settings saved in the user’s .config folder? Again you have to know to look for this, but that should be most of your settings right?

/home/[username]/.config/

I mean, i feel obvious for saying this, but maybe others dont know: If we’re just talking about apps, this is also a 1-liner in most package managers that you can even automate in a shell script

sudo apt-get install firefox vlc thunderbird etc…

if we’re talking more complex environments like a dev environment, mix of python packages, libraries, docker containers, etc obviously thats a lot of attention to manually save all of those details for later and something else should probably be used, like home-manager