Linux

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

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.

It's absolutely fine, even if something is missing you can solve that with distrobox or similar tools.

I almost feel bad that I haven't. I've used their documentation for years but never installed the distro. Most recently I've been having fun with NixOS.

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.

@emiellr
I did it for a while and I'm about to do it again

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

The Alpine simplicity is attractive, but I failed to install it while keeping my /home partition. Setting this manually is beyond my skills.

There is nothing stopping you from doing so

I saw a video on this exact topic a while ago, it was pretty interesting. Not enough to make me move off Arch (BTW), but I could see it used on some old hardware if I felt like tinkerin'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNYtJ3jyMRs

Sorry for the reddit link, I don't know of a mirror. This was posted just today, running on an EeePC:

https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/1fitgri/labwc_pimp_your_10_inches_laptop_with_alpine_linux/

I tried to get it running on a 2 GiB RAM laptop I've got, but couldn't get wifi to work at all

I tried it and liked that they have quite some documentation for how to do things like get to a desktop. However I couldn't get audio working so I stopped using it, but I am also not really experienced in setting up Desktops so maybe it's easy.

The current installer was borked so i tried Void for my server.

Btw, Xorg has no permission for video on my Void notebook? I ask here since both are somewhat similiar.

I've dabbled in it, but not really committed to it. It's a great lightweight server of course. I am a KDE Plasma user so I did a quick test of that and was able to install it via Alpine, but at the time, the support for javaws was not there which I needed at the time for my job, so that killed my plans on using it. I may venture back to it later on .