Apline linux is all about small and KISS, simple and small. Unbelievably small for its functionality. Its ease of installing and running is like no other we have ever tried. It is aimed for people needing to build secure servers in virtual machines, clouds, etc. but it can serve as a desktop installation as well. OpenRC is there to start everything you need up and supervise services. Musl is a library replacing the huge usual glibc, and this alone is responsible for the small size and quickness.The image selection for installing or using live is a little confusing. It is confusing as there is standard. extended, vanilla, virtual, xen, and mini-root filesystem. I used extended and that was a little more than 342MB, the rest are about 100MB or less. By current trends that is confusingly small.
It says on its description that it contains LXDE, therefore openbox, which is what I use most often. The installation was a little unusual but simple and worked out of the box. I tried an iso for the VLocity edition. I initially tried installing openbox and a few LXDE native packages I am comfortable with (lxterminal, pcmanfm, lxappearance etc.). Not much of what I installed really worked on openbox and the editions seemed older than I can remember. So I went back to xfce. 
Redcore is yet another distribution consciously staying away from systemd, it is part of their “philosophy” as it is for Artix and Devuan. Redcore is a fork of Gentoo in a non Gentoo kind of way. In Gentoo you built all packages from source and you built the system piece by piece instead of doing an installation where an already built system is copied into your drive intact and ready to boot. Redcore takes that step to avoid you of all the trouble (days of work, reading, compiling and configuring) and builds the Gentoo packages incorporating the most common hardware it may adopt to. 
systemd-free linux community 