current installation system seems to require DKMS about 8814au HOT 3 CLOSED

$ make
$ sudo make install
$ sudo reboot

There is your basic manual installation.

Some thoughts:

I am not familiar with Alpine and you did not mention what the hardware is so I may be of limited help.

If I was looking at running a distro that may fall a little short being considered mainstream and I wanted to use a usb wifi adapter, I would seek out an adapter that uses in-kernel drivers...

https://github.com/morrownr/USB-WiFi

from 8814au.

I had no trouble getting it built and loaded, and did end up deciding to return the card when I found it unsuitable for my use.

Thanks for the work you do on all this regardless!

(I run Alpine on a Pi 4, just in case you were curious)

from 8814au.

I have a Pi4b (and 3b). You likely made a good decision returning the 8814au adapter. I have drivers up for all the modern dual band Realtek chipsets. The worst driver in the bunch is this one. It is old and fragile. Also, the 8814au chipset uses a lot of juice (around 900 mA) and the Pi usb subsystem can only supply about 1200 mA total.

USB WiFi adapters work well with the Pi's but some work better than others. My opinion, based on a lot of testing, is that I would use adapters based on the following chipsets on Pi's:

mt7612u - in-kernel
mt7610u - in-kernel
rt5572 - in-kernel
rtl8811au - https://github.com/morrownr/8821au-20210708

The mt7612u based adapter gives ac1200/1300 capability but only takes about 380 mA of power running full speed.

from 8814au.