This might be the dumbest stuff anyone has asked here, but has anyone tried running Alpine as a desktop base OS? Seems pretty well stocked when it comes to the repo, and it’s light asf.

Thoughts?

  • bbbhltz@beehaw.org
    1·
    3 months ago

    I did this for several months. If you check out the Alpine community you’ll see that many people do this. So, it is not a dumb idea. Alpine is a “generalist” distro and comes packed with all the DEs and WMs you want. They also accept package requests and are usually pretty fast about it.

    I would recommend using the Edge branch just to have access to the newest packages, but keep an eye on the issue tracker before hitting update. Also, get on their Matrix and other accounts to follow different discussions.

  • Sickday@kbin.earth
    1·
    3 months ago

    I did for some time. There’s beauty in the simplicity and flexibility of Alpine, plus BusyBox is great once you understand all the weird quirks between it and coreutils. As unpopular as it might be, I actually really like OpenRC. Alpine feels pretty close to BSD if you’re familiar with that family of operating systems. These days I use it for just about all my servers save for a few Nix boxes.

    If you decide to explore this route, here are a couple tools I found useful at the start:

    • Conty - A single executable that launches applications in a standalone Linux Container
    • x11docker - Run GUI apps and desktop environments in docker and podman containers.

    Also might behoove you to check out Alpine community’s documentation on chroots in case you need specific software that isn’t available otherwise.