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?
There is nothing stopping you from doing so
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.
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.
Alpine works great for the desktop and I’m using it myself for my lower end machine.
Working without glibc and with some strangly named packages is sometimes tricky, but so far I have been able to do anything I’d wanted!
If it can help you in your journey, here is my personal configuration for Alpine, with WMs and DEs on their own branches. Only the ‘suckless’ (DWM) and ‘xfce’ are working properly so far: https://gitlab.com/sunoc/als/-/tree/suckless?ref_type=heads
I have been using Alpine as my main desktop system
If you need gaming, or you have a Nvidia GPU, your idea is dead on the water, not having glibc makes nvidia drivers impossible to use.
But that aside, the desktop feels snappy, the system is extremely small so knowing exactly how everything is running/working, and OpenRC is a breath of fresh air compared to the ‘do everything’ SystemD. All pieces of Alpine just does one thing, which makes things really predictable.
Albeit, my path isn’t without hiccups, for example X11 made suspend when the lid closes outright crash X11, so was forced into Wayland And Pipewire, I have to restart it whenever I switch from the computer speakers to headphones or vice-versa
You’ll find some small bugs and small issues, but if you really want a more spartan and simplistic way to handle your linux box, it is amazing
Also, APK is the best package manager, I felt in love with it
Its possible to install glibc on Alpine. https://hatchjs.com/alpine-linux-install-full-glibc/
That is fake https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages?name=glibc*&branch=edge&repo=&arch=&maintainer= I have felt for it too, but glibc-full doesn’t exist I have found a package on github though, that claims to add glibc, but whenever I tried to use it to, for example, run the nvidia installer, the entire thing just segfaults
Sorry for the bad link, I will be more careful for the next time.
In the official website, the glibc page was updated with a new glibc layer. You can also check if you have “nouveau” drivers for Nvidia.
