Alpine was never meant as a desktop distribution.
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I’ve been using it as daily driver since four or five years now. At first it was a bit difficult, we had to wait for patches for musl a lot for common desktop binaries. But now I don’t even remember waiting for an update and I don’t have to compile some tools myself anymore. Everything is in the repo. Yes i agree, I don’t need much, it just works flawlessly with River + Foot + Firefox + Helix and I try to keep it minimal. No games, not much graphical tools. apk is such a magical tool. Never broke my edge install with it… Like Arch did with AUR. And the last install that I did recently on a remote server was just so easy with ‘setup-alpine’… Way better than five years ago. The only drawback is the documentation I think… I’m using the gentoo one, which is perfect for Alpine.
I mean you exactly underline what I said. You can use anything for desktop usage, depending on your requirements. But Alpine is not meant to be used like this. Or with requirements like yours, you basically could use anything, there is no really advantage of using Alpine for your specific needs compared to many other distros out there.
I am not saying nobody should use Alpine on desktop, its just false “advertising” if you proclaim its perfectly fine to be run a s such.
Works nicely as a phone distribution though (in the form of postmarketOS).
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I’d probably use Alpine to some capacity if NixOS wasn’t a thing.
I’m trying to get into Nix but I’m too stupid for it or something
It has a steep learning curve in the beginning but so does every mildly complex thing.
If there’s anything you’re stuck with, make sure you seek help in the appropriate channels such as !nixos!nixos@lemmy.ml.
I tried Alpine for a desktop installation. The package manager has surprisingly decent package set. And the performance is the best I found, for some reason applications starts faster. But I had to stop the experience because websites thats includes widevine didn’t work. Its sad to say, but many softwares relies on non-standard glibc shit. With glibc instead of musl Alpine can be simply the best distro. If musl is not faster that glibc I don’t think glibc will make Alpine slower.
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Very nice article. I mostly know alpine from postmarketOS, but maybe I should look at it on the desktop at some point.
I’ve been playing around with Alpine recently and I quite like it. Now if I can just get my virtual desktop Alpine container to work correctly I would be very happy haha.
I’ve been installing Gentoo on my every machine. But I realistically could install Alpine on those few that I don’t use so often. At least I’m gonna test. It’s been years since I used Alpine on any machine.
Alpine is pretty awesome. The reason I use Debian over it is mostly just because I’m more familiar with it. Though I don’t run alpine on a couple servers. The docs are also awesome.
Because its a “niche” distro (like OpenBSD) that does not have a “real” purpose. As in, its niche is not “mandatory” by any means.
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What is the “real” purpose of Debian or Arch?
I should have been more clear – Debian/Arch “just works” and (both low/mid/high users) do not need of anything beyond that. And both Alpine/OpenBSD do not provide an extra “need” to anything of what both Debian/Arch already does. Unless if Alpine and/or OpenBSD provides a feature that makes Arch/Debian obsolete in any way… then yep, both will become more relevant.
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both don’t “just work” for many users.
…Windows users (migrating from Windows to Linux or just “posers”) do not count. :^)
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Alpine linux has plenty of cases
pretty good for servers
a fast package manager
…which are easily surpassed by (pretty much any distro). And idk why you highlighted those like its a some sort of “deal breaker” for whoever wants a stable/reliable distro – even a potato (486 and down) can run apt (which is terribly slow compared to any other package manager) incredibly fast nowadays. If those are (still) issues that are considered to be critical by you… then eh, I’m afraid to say that it’s a (You) problem. :^)
bro
(insert thuglife 12 year old here)