7 ms·

Alpine Linux Minimalist Desktop

72 points by clay-dreidels 4y ago

mro_name 4y ago
anyone seen it on an asus x205ta (32 bit BIOS, sigh)?
emptypuru 4y ago
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.
clay-dreidels 4y ago
I’ve been running this setup for a year.
- stock_toaster 4y ago
  I've been using alpine with kde-plasma[1] for a little while now. Mostly works great! [1]: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/KDE https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/KDE
  - sph 4y ago
    > Mostly works great! 60% of the time it works every time!
  - 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
    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.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
      > 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.
yamtaddle 4y ago
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.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  > ... 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/expect 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 https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Alpine_local_backup to save the system.
mackatsol 4y ago
I’ve never heard of it. Can you provide some details on what it’s about? Why you chose it.. and so on?
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  Alpine? It's tiny
Scarbutt 4y ago
The blockers are always going to be with musl
- MisterTea 4y ago
  You can always chroot. Similar to how I run steam on my Void musl machine via flatpak.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    Or docker or podman, if that's your preference.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  Sometimes, but it Just Works often enough. Depends on your usecase.
ithrow 4y ago
Why is alpine so popular for VMs/containers when popular runtimes like the JVM or nodejs don't officially support musl?
- josephcsible 4y ago
  Because it makes really tiny images, and most stuff does work even if it's not officially supported.
  - 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
    And if you need to use something non-musl compatible, you just make a container with a different base OS.
- LinuxBender 4y ago
  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.
- NegativeLatency 4y ago
  My last job we actually switched away from it because of bugs and went back to Ubuntu for container base images
piaste 4y ago
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.
- nibbleshifter 4y ago
  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).
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  > 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.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  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.
  - 4y ago
nathants 4y ago
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.
- rahen 4y ago
  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).
  - nathants 4y ago
    agree! that alpine ships ec2 amis is one of the reasons that i moved to alpine. have had no issues so far.
  - zackees 4y ago
usbfingers 4y ago
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.

72 points by clay-dreidels 4y ago

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

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.

clay-dreidels 4y ago

I’ve been running this setup for a year.

stock_toaster 4y ago
I've been using alpine with kde-plasma[1] for a little while now. Mostly works great! [1]: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/KDE https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/KDE
- sph 4y ago
  > Mostly works great! 60% of the time it works every time!
- 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  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.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    > 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.

yamtaddle 4y ago

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.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
> ... 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/expect 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 https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Alpine_local_backup to save the system.

mackatsol 4y ago

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

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
Alpine? It's tiny

Scarbutt 4y ago

The blockers are always going to be with musl

MisterTea 4y ago
You can always chroot. Similar to how I run steam on my Void musl machine via flatpak.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  Or docker or podman, if that's your preference.
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
Sometimes, but it Just Works often enough. Depends on your usecase.

ithrow 4y ago

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

josephcsible 4y ago
Because it makes really tiny images, and most stuff does work even if it's not officially supported.
- 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  And if you need to use something non-musl compatible, you just make a container with a different base OS.
LinuxBender 4y ago
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.
NegativeLatency 4y ago
My last job we actually switched away from it because of bugs and went back to Ubuntu for container base images

piaste 4y ago

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.

nibbleshifter 4y ago
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).
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
> 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.
moffkalast 4y ago
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.
- 4y ago

nathants 4y ago

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.

rahen 4y ago
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).
- nathants 4y ago
  agree! that alpine ships ec2 amis is one of the reasons that i moved to alpine. have had no issues so far.
- zackees 4y ago

usbfingers 4y ago

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.