Questions from a Slackware user

Hi,

I'm a 48 year old Austrian living in South France. I've been 100 % GNU/Linux since 2001, and I'm running my own little IT business based on Linux and free software. I've used many different distributions over the years, but I'm mainly a Slackware user.

Alpine Linux has made me curious, since it's one of the rare distributions refusing to jump on the systemd ship, and I have a few questions.

1. What's Alpine Linux' support cycle? If I put a release on a server or on a desktop, how long will I get security updates?

2. If a package is not included in the repos - which should happen - how easy/hard is it to build one?

3. How big (approximately) is Alpine Linux' community?

4. I've downloaded the ISO recommended for a disk install, but it won't boot as a VirtualBox guest. Is that a known problem?

Cheers from the sunny South of France,

Niki