Alpine as a desktop OS

emiellr@lemm.ee to Linux@lemmy.ml – 77 points –

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?

41

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

Oh interesting, didn't think of Graphics drivers getting in the way. It'll go on a Framework laptop, most if not everything should work ootb... ~famous last words~

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.

Nouveau sadly doesn't work for me, it's abysmally bad performance even on X11

And the new compat layer is new for me, might give it a try

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

Arch (BTW)

I see what you did there

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/

Ayo wtf, that desktop is pretty asf. Well done!

Not my post btw, just sharing the link :)

Oh right, I forgot. Ahem... REDDIT?! HERESY!!1!

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 wanna get into Nix but I keep bouncing off the documentation every time I try to study it

I currently use NixOS and nix-darwin, and I've enjoyed the ride so far. I use flakes with direnv for reproducible development environments, and this has been working out well. I've also been impressed with using Nix to build OCI containers.

The learning curve isn't flat, but the ecosystem is fantastic.

Makes sense; one of the big things about it that interests me is the dockerfile generation. Although, I should probably get a better understanding of dockerfiles themselves before jumping into that; I have a habit of forgetting the order of carts and horses

Dockerfiles act as instructions for the docker (or compatible) CLI to use for building OCI container images. Images may or may not have layers and can be exported as a tarball for inspection (with tools like dive).

Nix provides native support for building container images, and the resulting archive must be loaded using docker load. There is another library (nix2container) that aims for better performance and relies on skopeo for copying the built image to a docker-compatible server, local or remote.

Just wanted to share a some of the information I've learned. Cheers!

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

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

Damn that's a shame

I know! Will definitely try again at the next release. So far I'm running a minimal install of Arch without DE (only running Sway) and it works pretty well, but I'm not a fan of the bleeding edge release schedule. Wouls prefer something more stable, especially for that laptop which I don't plan on using as my daily driver

What I do is use the "Arch Linux Archive" repo and set it to a specific date, which has a snapshot of all the packages from that time. That way I don't have to update all the time but can still install packages whenever I want. When I feel like updating then I just increase the date in the mirror URL. In pacman.conf you would set it like so: Server=https://archive.archlinux.org/repos/2024/08/30/$repo/os/$arch

Let me guess, Broadcom

Back in my day Broadcom was the company that causes non stop problems

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 .

Iff you're a VSCode user, you might benefit greatly from Dev Containers. You'll basically be running Docker containers, which can run almost anything of course.

I'm also a Plasma user, and I decided to try it out in a vm yesterday after reading this thread. It didn't appear to play nicely in a vm. It was honestly the weirdest thing. Lots of freezes in my plasma session. Not the only distro that has problems in a vm, but still unexpected.

Anyways, there were a lot more packages for it than I initially thought. However, still lacked some things that I wanted to use, and like nixOS it seems different enough that I would need to put in a bit of work to get those things working on alpine.

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.

Multiple people seem to have had problems with audio

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.

brother this has nothing to do with my post 😂