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Comment by skrtskrt | Hacker News Reader

I would love for Alpine to progress to the point where it's a realistic desktop or server OS, rather than the OS for the containers that run on an Ubuntu or Debian server.

Edit: Just got inspired and went to the contributing page.

Think I'll start using it to develop with Vim in a VM locally and see where things go from there.

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I had to install glibc last time I tried Alpine as desktop distribution, so

What is it missing that makes you feel it is unrealistic?

I am thinking more about adoption - and things that come with adoption - than functionality.

It's not an option for which OS to flash onto my DigitalOcean VM. Getting it going on Raspberry Pi is largely undocumented.

For desktop, it doesn't (officially) support many window managers or desktops.

On desktop, we support KDE, GNOME and Xfce, which are the big ones, but yes, we could use more work there.

It is hoped that the cloud images project will get Alpine available in all of the main platforms, we've done AWS already starting with 3.13.

I'm one of the maintainers of the cloud images and I can confirm that our goal is to release at least GCP and Azure images in addition to the AWS ones for the 3.14 release cycle. We're also looking for suggestions on other cloud providers for which people would like to see official Alpine images built.

https://github.com/mcrute/alpine-ec2-ami/issues/99

Thanks for your response!

I am tempted to go try it on AWS, but I am sticking to DigitalOcean for personal projects for reasons. I will be very happy when it shows up on DO.

An important philosophy to adopt as a user of Alpine is to take responsibility for the software you want to use on it. If you need a particular window manager or desktop environment, take responsibility for packaging it and making it available. The value of Alpine has little to do with package availability, and it's easy enough to package up anything you need yourself.

I feel I am far from enough Linux knowledge to contribute, but I am inspired to get there.

If you don't mind using IRC, there's a lot of people willing to help you get started with this adventure in #alpine-devel on freenode.

Building up to a usable desktop in Alpine is a good way to start gaining some of that knowledge.

I had a laptop for a while that I built up from alpine-extended to a pretty nice side machine, complete with Sway, vim, Rust, Firefox, and a couple others.

Alpine Linux is a system which appeals to those who want to know how their system works (and to be responsible for it as such). If you don't want to know how your system works, and don't want to be responsible for it, then much of Alpine's value proposition is lost compared to other distros.

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