Alpine Linux Minimalist Desktop | Hacker News Reader

Alpine Linux Minimalist Desktop

github.com

72 pointsclay-dreidels45 comments

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.

> 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.

Why not? Alpine is a perfectly good distro.

> 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?

What? Alpine is a Linux distro; it has the same drivers as everything else. And it packages desktop stuff just fine; I've never had a problem using it.

EDIT: I should qualify "never" - I've had less trouble using Alpine as a desktop than Void, let's say. Some programs aren't portable enough to handle musl, but that's a different issue.

Linux devs: "I've got it, let's make another minimalistic GUI that doesn't have enough functionality for daily use."

Also Linux devs: "Wait, why is nobody using Linux on desktop?"

Half kidding since those lightweights do have use cases, but on the other hand KDE only barely gets close to the levels of functionality and customization that Windows offers and it's about the heaviest display manager out there. Meanwhile Gnome is both slow and just about completely hardcoded hah.

Agreed. We don't need more desktops, we should improve the ones we have.

Speaking of improvements, if you haven't tried KDE in a while, it has become considerably lighter in recent years. It is quite a bit snappier as well.

Skipping the indexing features, it gets pretty close to Xfce, MATE and LXDE in resource usage.

I'm actually running KUbuntu 20.04 on one of my machines right now and it's honestly really good (outside some occasional annoying shit that'll be ironed out eventually I hope), but I'm running it from an SSD with fairly decent hardware so it's hard to say anything about performance.

I tried OpenSUSE Tumbleweed a couple weeks back on a Raspberry Pi 4 and found the experience tolerable.

Of course, tolerable is a subjective term.

This reminds me, someone needs to make an open source remake of Among Us and call it OpenSUS

This is not a slight against KDE, but without a tiling WM I'm maybe not enjoying it enough to switch from Windows.

It's one thing that I can't do my work on Windows (without a VM or containers), but my workflow being completely dead in the water with KDE or xfce is something else.

This is not only about fragmentation, it's also about philosophy of WMs/DEs.

Sometimes we don't need a desktop for daily use. Example: I'm considering a minimal desktop to just run VLC on a file server and display videos to my TV.

Why not just run a media sever like Emby and stream the videos directly?

To me it seems that the simpler option is to run VLC directly connected to the tv. Streaming is seamless now and Emby makes it easy but why have all that complexity involved when you can just play in VLC and get a better quality video?

sorry my brain read "VLC" as "VNC" and I was thinking you were watching videos over remote desktop LOL

Just run XBMC from Lightdm in any OS.

Just so you know, LibreELEC might be able to fulfill this need better. It's a JEOS style appliance with just enough Linux to bootstrap Kodi and that includes a file manager and you can use Samba to move files around over the network. Since Kodi (formerly known as XBMC) is a ten-foot interface, it was made for watching videos on your TV. There are also all sorts of skins to make it easy to use and nice to look at, including some you'd be convinced you were using your very own personal Netflix library, curated by you alone.

I know about LibreELEC and Kodi/XMBC because I used them years ago. I didn't know about Emby, suggested in another reply. I'm a little wary about those systems especially if backed by a company. Maybe they'll go fully commercial or shut down and I'll have a system to rebuild and relearn. I don't see much value in those interfaces, I won't pay for one. I prefer a bare file system and VLC. They'll be available forever.

> Linux devs: "I've got it, let's make another minimalistic GUI that doesn't have enough functionality for daily use."

As a person daily-driving it, I promise it does in fact have enough functionality for daily use. And are you sure those are the same people? My impression is that there are two groups; minimalist hackers who want an ultra-light system and build that, and people who want a system that's easy to use for the masses and build that (KDE, GNOME, XFCE). And because it's FOSS and mostly unpaid, people work individually on the things that they directly value, hence the wide range of options.

Needs a custom package manager and text editor for the trifecta.

Hacker News: We should have less hacking and more real work!

I mean, what actually are the features you need from a WM/DE?

>Meanwhile Gnome is both slow and just about completely hardcoded hah.

Come back to the Mate desktop. It's the original Gnome desktop, just like you remember it in 2010, only ported to GTK3. I personally like the Ubuntu-Mate version but the guy running that project has been recently working to port over the specific changes between that and stock Mate desktop to Debian so that will also be a possibility soon.

Give it a look at: https://ubuntu-mate.org

Alpine was a desktop/server distro long before it became a container distro (and it became a container distro because it was light as fuck).

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.

Try it on servers as well. If something doesn't work as it should, just run it in a CentOS/Ubuntu container.

It usually works better than doing the opposite (CentOS/Ubuntu server running Alpine containers).

agree! that alpine ships ec2 amis is one of the reasons that i moved to alpine. have had no issues so far.

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.

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

It's not on the default system if that's what you mean, but it's packaged as https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/package/v3.16/main/x86_64/expec... so you could at least install it partway in and rerun that way.

Depending on the goal you might be better off using https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Alpine_local_backup to save the system.

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.

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

Because it makes really tiny images, and most stuff does work even if it's not officially supported.

And if you need to use something non-musl compatible, you just make a container with a different base OS.

Adding to what josephcsible said, not just tiny but also super simple. I use Alpine on all my routers/firewalls/VM's/physical servers for personal use. I've been very happy with it thus far. Simple upgrades. Easy to debug. All the packages I use appear to be compiled with decent hardening options. The LTS kernel is just a few days behind kernel.org.

I've not tried to use it as a desktop. I alternate between Void and QubesOS for desktops.

My last job we actually switched away from it because of bugs and went back to Ubuntu for container base images

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.

I’ve been running this setup for a year.

I've been using alpine with kde-plasma[1] for a little while now. Mostly works great!

[1]: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/KDE

I use Alpine with XFCE on my laptop. Non-musl apps work ok in flatpak. Biggest annoyance is when I install a new Alpine package and it (for reasons I can't fathom) uninstalls my wifi packages so I have to grab an ethernet cable and reinstall everything. There's also a bug seg-faulting my X server when I scroll too much on my touchpad, but if I'm gentle it doesn't crash.

> Biggest annoyance is when I install a new Alpine package and it (for reasons I can't fathom) uninstalls my wifi packages so I have to grab an ethernet cable and reinstall everything.

What happens if you run with `apk add -i`? That's a weird bug.

> Mostly works great!

60% of the time it works every time!

The blockers are always going to be with musl

You can always chroot. Similar to how I run steam on my Void musl machine via flatpak.

Or docker or podman, if that's your preference.

Sometimes, but it Just Works often enough. Depends on your usecase.

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

Alpine? It's tiny

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

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