The disk blocks are streamed on demand, so a connection is required. The virtual disk is quite large (1.5GB) which is necessary to run a full distro but makes

The disk blocks are streamed on demand, so a connection is required. The virtual disk is quite large (1.5GB) which is necessary to run a full distro but makes pre-downloading for offline mode not possible. It _could_ work if you let your workload run once and then disconnect, but there is no guarantee. Installing packages is supported both in the Debian terminal and Alpine desktop.