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How suitable is Alpine as a desktop distribution? It seems like a low-GNU distribution with an emphaisis on static linkage. Is that a correct assessment? I'm

How suitable is Alpine as a desktop distribution? It seems like a low-GNU distribution with an emphaisis on static linkage. Is that a correct assessment? I'm very happy with Arch, I stopped my distro-hopping six years ago when I landed on it, but I worry that I'm getting complacent because Arch is just so easy to use.

sdfasdslk 8y ago
Static linkage is a beautiful prospect, beckoning with promises of less time in dependency hell.
- sevensor 8y ago
  Although that sounds nice, dependency hell has never been a problem for me under Arch. Sometimes AUR-installed packages go out of date, but then you rebuild them and everything is OK again.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  As someone that lived through the introduction of dynamic linking and threading into UNIX, it is kind of ironic to see the return to the past being celebrated with joy.
  - fao_ 8y ago
    Dynamic Linking was actually heralded against by many of the foundational minds of UNIX. Because the flaws outweight the benefits. Do not quote me on this, but IIRC Plan9 does not have dynamic linking for this very reason. http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/dynamic-linking/ http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/dynamic-linking/
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      Plan 9 was a middle step for Inferno, the OS HNers keep forgetting about. Dynamic linking is everywhere on Inferno, implemented by the same Rob Pike of that email thread. Also many seem unaware that Go supports dynamic linking for a couple of versions already. The only thing missing is building plugin libraries on Windows.
      - fao_ 8y ago
        > Plan 9 was a middle step for Inferno, the OS HNers keep forgetting about. I am aware of Inferno. Also, the irony in talking about "HNers" as an Other, when you yourself are, to me, a random HNer. It's like an Anon implicitly complaining about an Anon, rather amusing. > Dynamic linking is everywhere on Inferno, implemented by the same Rob Pike of that email thread. Sure, but (if I remember correctly) Inferno also is written on/as a virtual machine. Inferno had rather different aims compared to most "UNIX" systems, whereas Plan 9 was a unification and generalization of the "UNIX" paradigm. Windows NT (Or was it DOS) was built, in part, off of UNIX. That doesn't mean that we should look to Windows NT as an ideal UNIX system, because the design considerations are different, and the aims of the system are different. > Also many seem unaware that Go supports dynamic linking for a couple of versions already. Sure, that's not to say there wasn't a huge amount of debate around that. I believe in the end it was more or less agreed that language uptake was more important in this case, but I could be wrong. Regardless, if one is properly appraised of the debate around Go supporting dynamic linking, you can find Uriel, et al. have some solid arguments against dynamic linking.
mises 8y ago
I probably wouldn't use it for desktops. The AUR (and all the packages it offers) is one if the best features of arch and very convenient for desktop users. Not something I'd like to give up on my desktop, and it's dependent on gnu stuff to work. However, it's great for small servers. I use raspberry pis and old computers to serve applications at home, and I just switched them all to Alpine. Perfect for that use case; orders of magnitude better than something like ubuntu server. I would highly recommend it for server. Quick edit before anyone gets all offended: yeah it could be used for desktop, I just wouldn't recommend it. Especially coming from arch, the AUR represents a massive repository of software. It will likely be a while befire Alpine is in a similar position, especially if they want to stick to their musl static-link ethos. It's a lot easier to deal with compiling and possibly minor porting yourself for a single-porpose server box (only needs a few apps) vs a multi-purpose general box (needs many).
- qznc 8y ago
  Recently I switched my little server from Ubuntu to Alpine. I'm now thinking of switching back. I miss Systemd. Ubuntus repo has so much more stuff.
JoshuaRLi 8y ago
Well for starters, there's X, some window managers, and firefox. It really just depends on what graphical software you need.
- sevensor 8y ago
  I work on graphical software using PyQt5. I'm not afraid of building Qt myself (looks like the system Qt is still 4.8). Under Arch, and even CentOS7, building Qt is a breeze (at least if you configure out QtWebEngine), but on Alpine I'd worry about satisfying the dependencies. I might give it a spin because things just seem too easy right now :)
platform 8y ago
Not answering your question directly. But found, for my needs for desktop support for Wayland is important (because I use AMD graphics cards without a fan (as I cannot cope with noise well)). And since manufacture driver support for AMD is not there (my cards are over 5 years old) -- I found that speed of Wayland is really good. So I 'standardized', on Fedora and just upgraded from 27 to 29 in one shot, using their upgrade plugin with 0 problems (had to uninstall like 3 packages and put them back).
efiecho 8y ago
The only problem with using Alpine as a desktop distribution, is that security updates will sometimes take months to be available, and this is only because the team working on Alpine is very small. If this wasn't an issue, I would not use anything else on the desktop.
- grumpy-cowboy 8y ago
  If security fixes can take months, then it's not suitable for any use (especially on servers).
fao_ 8y ago
I ran two arch boxes for about 7 years, two years ago I got an X200 with libreboot and did not want systemd on it. I chose Alpine because it allows you to use musl libc, this was after fighting a bug in the gentoo build process. The idea is to understand exactly how my system boots up, so I can cut as much cruft from it as possible, and also for my system to boot up in the same order every time, something that in my experience maintaining several computers with systemd, causes a lot of problems with chasing down bugs (If the bugs are nonexistent half the time because the services boot up in almost-random order, how the hell can you debug it?!). In my experience, it's extremely viable. Most things you can get away with pulling from the Alpine repos, everything else you can stick in a chroot (musl libc causes some problems with compatibility) or compile from source (Which is usually quicker than you'd think, except when C++ gets involved). It's so much more stable than any other modern linux system I have run. Someone I know has a twin X230 with Manjaro on, and the boot-up time is so long. I managed to get my Alpine box to 40 seconds to gui, but was limited by the dhcp resolution and the pre-boot flashups. Manjaro takes about three or four minutes to get to the login screen, and then another minute or two to load the GUI. My much more powerful arch box has about the same bootup times as the X230, even though theoretically I am using lighter technologies. Something I have noticed as well is that because of systemd running boot items concurrently, it actually ends up with a less deterministic boot. A lot of the times it simply fails to resolve wifi on boot (leading to a several minute hang), and the systemd logs and dmesg show absolutely nothing at fault.
squarefoot 8y ago
For what I've seen in the 20 minutes I tried it, it's probably best suited for ridiculously low footprint cli only installs. My favorite low fat distro for desktop on constrained x86 hardware is DietPI, which regardless of the name doesn't run only on xPI boards and is functionally very close to a normal Debian, although much lighter. This is from a DietPi x86-64 install onto a Virtualbox VM, XFCE desktop plus an open terminal and both Firefox and LibreOffice loaded; Firefox showing mozilla.org webpage and Libreoffice Writer an empty page. Not bad at all! Although I prefer Armbian for embedded boards, DietPi really screams on small netbooks. dietpi@DietPi:~$ free total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 2052524 464456 1112748 41452 475320 1405128 Swap: 45052 0 45052 (beware of punch-in-the-eye colors) https://dietpi.com/#download https://dietpi.com/#download

sdfasdslk 8y ago

Static linkage is a beautiful prospect, beckoning with promises of less time in dependency hell.

sevensor 8y ago
Although that sounds nice, dependency hell has never been a problem for me under Arch. Sometimes AUR-installed packages go out of date, but then you rebuild them and everything is OK again.
pjmlp 8y ago
As someone that lived through the introduction of dynamic linking and threading into UNIX, it is kind of ironic to see the return to the past being celebrated with joy.
- fao_ 8y ago
  Dynamic Linking was actually heralded against by many of the foundational minds of UNIX. Because the flaws outweight the benefits. Do not quote me on this, but IIRC Plan9 does not have dynamic linking for this very reason. http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/dynamic-linking/ http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/dynamic-linking/
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Plan 9 was a middle step for Inferno, the OS HNers keep forgetting about. Dynamic linking is everywhere on Inferno, implemented by the same Rob Pike of that email thread. Also many seem unaware that Go supports dynamic linking for a couple of versions already. The only thing missing is building plugin libraries on Windows.
    - fao_ 8y ago
      > Plan 9 was a middle step for Inferno, the OS HNers keep forgetting about. I am aware of Inferno. Also, the irony in talking about "HNers" as an Other, when you yourself are, to me, a random HNer. It's like an Anon implicitly complaining about an Anon, rather amusing. > Dynamic linking is everywhere on Inferno, implemented by the same Rob Pike of that email thread. Sure, but (if I remember correctly) Inferno also is written on/as a virtual machine. Inferno had rather different aims compared to most "UNIX" systems, whereas Plan 9 was a unification and generalization of the "UNIX" paradigm. Windows NT (Or was it DOS) was built, in part, off of UNIX. That doesn't mean that we should look to Windows NT as an ideal UNIX system, because the design considerations are different, and the aims of the system are different. > Also many seem unaware that Go supports dynamic linking for a couple of versions already. Sure, that's not to say there wasn't a huge amount of debate around that. I believe in the end it was more or less agreed that language uptake was more important in this case, but I could be wrong. Regardless, if one is properly appraised of the debate around Go supporting dynamic linking, you can find Uriel, et al. have some solid arguments against dynamic linking.

mises 8y ago

I probably wouldn't use it for desktops. The AUR (and all the packages it offers) is one if the best features of arch and very convenient for desktop users. Not something I'd like to give up on my desktop, and it's dependent on gnu stuff to work. However, it's great for small servers. I use raspberry pis and old computers to serve applications at home, and I just switched them all to Alpine. Perfect for that use case; orders of magnitude better than something like ubuntu server. I would highly recommend it for server. Quick edit before anyone gets all offended: yeah it could be used for desktop, I just wouldn't recommend it. Especially coming from arch, the AUR represents a massive repository of software. It will likely be a while befire Alpine is in a similar position, especially if they want to stick to their musl static-link ethos. It's a lot easier to deal with compiling and possibly minor porting yourself for a single-porpose server box (only needs a few apps) vs a multi-purpose general box (needs many).

qznc 8y ago
Recently I switched my little server from Ubuntu to Alpine. I'm now thinking of switching back. I miss Systemd. Ubuntus repo has so much more stuff.

JoshuaRLi 8y ago

Well for starters, there's X, some window managers, and firefox. It really just depends on what graphical software you need.

sevensor 8y ago
I work on graphical software using PyQt5. I'm not afraid of building Qt myself (looks like the system Qt is still 4.8). Under Arch, and even CentOS7, building Qt is a breeze (at least if you configure out QtWebEngine), but on Alpine I'd worry about satisfying the dependencies. I might give it a spin because things just seem too easy right now :)

platform 8y ago

Not answering your question directly. But found, for my needs for desktop support for Wayland is important (because I use AMD graphics cards without a fan (as I cannot cope with noise well)). And since manufacture driver support for AMD is not there (my cards are over 5 years old) -- I found that speed of Wayland is really good. So I 'standardized', on Fedora and just upgraded from 27 to 29 in one shot, using their upgrade plugin with 0 problems (had to uninstall like 3 packages and put them back).

efiecho 8y ago

The only problem with using Alpine as a desktop distribution, is that security updates will sometimes take months to be available, and this is only because the team working on Alpine is very small. If this wasn't an issue, I would not use anything else on the desktop.

grumpy-cowboy 8y ago
If security fixes can take months, then it's not suitable for any use (especially on servers).

fao_ 8y ago

I ran two arch boxes for about 7 years, two years ago I got an X200 with libreboot and did not want systemd on it. I chose Alpine because it allows you to use musl libc, this was after fighting a bug in the gentoo build process. The idea is to understand exactly how my system boots up, so I can cut as much cruft from it as possible, and also for my system to boot up in the same order every time, something that in my experience maintaining several computers with systemd, causes a lot of problems with chasing down bugs (If the bugs are nonexistent half the time because the services boot up in almost-random order, how the hell can you debug it?!). In my experience, it's extremely viable. Most things you can get away with pulling from the Alpine repos, everything else you can stick in a chroot (musl libc causes some problems with compatibility) or compile from source (Which is usually quicker than you'd think, except when C++ gets involved). It's so much more stable than any other modern linux system I have run. Someone I know has a twin X230 with Manjaro on, and the boot-up time is so long. I managed to get my Alpine box to 40 seconds to gui, but was limited by the dhcp resolution and the pre-boot flashups. Manjaro takes about three or four minutes to get to the login screen, and then another minute or two to load the GUI. My much more powerful arch box has about the same bootup times as the X230, even though theoretically I am using lighter technologies. Something I have noticed as well is that because of systemd running boot items concurrently, it actually ends up with a less deterministic boot. A lot of the times it simply fails to resolve wifi on boot (leading to a several minute hang), and the systemd logs and dmesg show absolutely nothing at fault.

squarefoot 8y ago

For what I've seen in the 20 minutes I tried it, it's probably best suited for ridiculously low footprint cli only installs. My favorite low fat distro for desktop on constrained x86 hardware is DietPI, which regardless of the name doesn't run only on xPI boards and is functionally very close to a normal Debian, although much lighter. This is from a DietPi x86-64 install onto a Virtualbox VM, XFCE desktop plus an open terminal and both Firefox and LibreOffice loaded; Firefox showing mozilla.org webpage and Libreoffice Writer an empty page. Not bad at all! Although I prefer Armbian for embedded boards, DietPi really screams on small netbooks. dietpi@DietPi:~$ free total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 2052524 464456 1112748 41452 475320 1405128 Swap: 45052 0 45052 (beware of punch-in-the-eye colors) https://dietpi.com/#download https://dietpi.com/#download