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?
- Sickday ( @Sickday@kbin.earth ) 16•1 day 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.
- dotslashme ( @dotslashme@infosec.pub ) English6•1 day ago
It’s absolutely fine, even if something is missing you can solve that with distrobox or similar tools.
- bbbhltz ( @bbbhltz@beehaw.org ) 16•2 days 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.
- visone ( @visone@fosstodon.org ) 10•2 days ago
@emiellr
I did it for a while and I’m about to do it again - Possibly linux ( @possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip ) English16•2 days ago
There is nothing stopping you from doing so
- MonkderVierte ( @MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml ) 1•1 day ago
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 😂
- MonkderVierte ( @MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml ) 1•1 day ago
Should have been attached to another answer.
- funkajunk ( @funkajunk@lemm.ee ) English7•2 days ago
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’.
- s08nlql9 ( @s08nlql9@lemm.ee ) 2•1 day ago
Arch (BTW)
I see what you did there
@funkajunk @emiellr or Chimera Linux.
Thank I’ll check it out
- drspod ( @drspod@lemmy.ml ) 6•2 days ago
Sorry for the reddit link, I don’t know of a mirror. This was posted just today, running on an EeePC:
Ayo wtf, that desktop is pretty asf. Well done!
- drspod ( @drspod@lemmy.ml ) 5•2 days ago
Not my post btw, just sharing the link :)
Oh right, I forgot. Ahem… REDDIT?! HERESY!!1!
- glaber ( @glaber@lemm.ee ) 3•2 days ago
I tried to get it running on a 2 GiB RAM laptop I’ve got, but couldn’t get wifi to work at all
- Possibly linux ( @possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip ) English1•1 day ago
Let me guess, Broadcom
Back in my day Broadcom was the company that causes non stop problems
Damn that’s a shame
- glaber ( @glaber@lemm.ee ) 2•2 days ago
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
- Possibly linux ( @possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip ) English2•1 day ago
Use Debian