I am also also a bsd person and also coincidentally ran my first alpine as a vm on bhyve this week.
It's busybox. If you don't need explicitly discrete binaries of the /bin and /sbin utils it is a tiny user-space and fast to boot. Tmux, zsh and I was done for most unix purposes.
To get to my endpoint I wound up doing a lot of apk installs (node. More node dependencies. Stuff) but overall I found it the best Linux experience I've had in a long time. I wish zfs was baked in, and more overt virtio bindings to things for bhyve zfs backed run.
It's busybox. If you don't need explicitly discrete binaries of the /bin and /sbin utils it is a tiny user-space and fast to boot. Tmux, zsh and I was done for most unix purposes.
To get to my endpoint I wound up doing a lot of apk installs (node. More node dependencies. Stuff) but overall I found it the best Linux experience I've had in a long time. I wish zfs was baked in, and more overt virtio bindings to things for bhyve zfs backed run.