from Hacker News

Alpine Linux Minimalist Desktop

by clay-dreidels on 10/17/22, 4:43 PM with 45 comments

  • by piaste on 10/17/22, 7:01 PM

    Strange choice. There's no shortage of minimalist desktop-oriented distros out there. Even if you specifically want a musl-based distros, Void Linux has a minimal base image which is probably a better starting point.

    I don't see much advantage in forcing an embedded/VM-oriented distro to do desktop work - how much fun are you going to have with device drivers, for example?

    The only reason I can see to use Alpine specifically is to test on a system that's as close to production servers as possible. But that's what VMs are for.

  • by nathants on 10/17/22, 7:26 PM

    i’ve been running alpine on two thinkpads for almost six months. it’s fantastic. was previously on arch, and ubuntu before that.

    i had no idea alpine ships setup-* scripts. there are so many of them and they are so good!

    postmarketos is alpine, so you can run the same distro on mobile and desktop.

    they support arm64, unlike arch.

    they ship ec2 amis, and rewrote cloudinit and made it way better.

    it feels like alpine minimalism just enables them to get a much more polished setup. things like solid setup scripts or cloud init scripts. they are good, because obviously they should be.

  • by yamtaddle on 10/17/22, 6:18 PM

    Could turn this entirely into a shell script per reboot with "expect", I... uh, expect. Or just one shell script with a little more cleverness (to initiate the next phase after each reboot, automatically).

    ... though I'm not sure whether "expect" is in base Alpine, or you'd have to install it, defeating most of the purpose.

  • by usbfingers on 10/17/22, 7:47 PM

    The cool part about using Alpine as a minimalist desktop is you can run the entire system from RAM - assuming you're running in diskless mode.

    I've showed people my Alpine desktop setup _on their own laptop_ by booting from a USB. After booting, I unplug the USB, continue running the distro, and then restarting their machine as if nothing ever happened. Lots of cool factor driving motivation there, but I agree it's not as easy to use nor maintainable for most people.

    Also if your workstation dies, just toggle BIOS settings - if needed - and boot on another machine. No swapping / migrating drives required. Works amazingly if you're used to running on crap / dated hardware.

  • by ithrow on 10/17/22, 6:32 PM

    Why is alpine so popular for VMs/containers when popular runtimes like the JVM or nodejs don't officially support musl?

  • by emptypuru on 10/17/22, 8:54 PM

    Been using alpine for a year as my daily driver. Initially switched from Arch to better understand postmarketos, but found alpine very pleasant and stayed with it. With alpine it feels easier to understand how a distro works due to minimality. Also it’s easier to jump into sources of little busybox utils rather than their full-blown util-linux/coreutils/systemd counterparts. And apk is faster than pacman.

  • by clay-dreidels on 10/17/22, 4:43 PM

    I’ve been running this setup for a year.

  • by Scarbutt on 10/17/22, 6:20 PM

    The blockers are always going to be with musl

  • by mackatsol on 10/17/22, 6:18 PM

    I’ve never heard of it. Can you provide some details on what it’s about? Why you chose it.. and so on?

  • by mro_name on 10/17/22, 7:51 PM

    anyone seen it on an asus x205ta (32 bit BIOS, sigh)?