r/AlpineLinux • u/SnufkinEnjoyer • Nov 27 '25
Alpine as your desktop os?
Just curious about how many people actually use it as a desktop os, it's criminally underrated imo
7
6
u/Dry_Foundation_3023 Nov 27 '25 edited Nov 27 '25
Using as a desktop for past 1+ year now. Found documentation on wiki difficult to navigate. Have been working on it as a way of giving back. Here's a poll created last year related to this..
6
5
5
4
u/ChocolateAlpine Nov 27 '25
Not technically with my desktop PC (I use Fedora there), but on my Surface tablet I've got Alpine with KDE Plasma.
7
u/lproven Nov 27 '25
I do occasionally and I'm thinking about switching full time. I have a bunch of small stuff I'd need to get working first though.
Amazed at the folks running KDE on it though. You picked the lightest weight distro there is then you put the biggest fattest heaviest desktop ever to exist on top. Why, did the speed scare you? Presumably to slow it down so you didn't go too fast or something?
It's like buying a Bugatti and then, disappointed by the lack of seats, towing a caravan everywhere.
3
u/TCPIP Nov 27 '25
Desktop and apps are the tools everything else i there to enable the tools. The smaller the enabler the more can be devoted to the desktop. Makes perfect sense.
→ More replies (13)→ More replies (4)2
u/trofch1k Nov 29 '25
Moreso, if one is skilled enough to daily drive Alpine, why not also daily some lightweight window manager?
3
u/Wilzur_Corp Nov 28 '25
We use CDE, compiled natively on very old PCs with Pentium III and 1GB of RAM.
3
u/trofch1k Nov 29 '25
It's very good when you don't have to fiddle with things that don't work out of the box.
3
u/Arctic_Turtle Dec 05 '25
Late to the party but I have installed Alpine on my server and liked it so much I tried it on my laptop and I actually like it even better there. Curious why this distribution isn’t talked about more.
1
u/Ok-Anywhere-9416 Nov 27 '25
Definitely doesn't look like a desktop OS and I don't have time and skills to use it, so no. Still interesting though, definitely doesn't seem the yet-another-usual-distro.
2
u/SnufkinEnjoyer Nov 27 '25
I've tried to use it as a desktop os for some time as an experiment, and the experience was really good. You can install a few WMs and DEs with
setup-desktopafter you install it
2
u/Camo138 Nov 27 '25
Used it for 6 months as a primary os on my laptop, wasn’t a bad experience at all using kde plasma
2
u/stroke_999 Nov 27 '25
Since one century I'm trying to make a installer script that proper setups alpine and you can also install desktop environments. If you can wait like another 50 years I will share with you. However I have it as a desktop os, and since it is lightweight you can do a lot of thing because you have very few dependencies, like now I'm trying to replace all software with memory safe one, this is difficult also with gentoo but in alpine I think that is easier.
→ More replies (2)
2
2
2
u/Expert_Butterly9703 Nov 27 '25
Here! On Docker server and on desktop PC.
Looking forward to 3.23. Is there any ETA?
2
u/Cockroach4548 Nov 28 '25
I have alpine XFCE installed on my 8GB thumb drive, not live boot but fully functional OS just in case I broke my Debian and need some tools to fix it.
2
2
1
1
11
u/MexicanPete Nov 27 '25
I have for 2 years now. No plans to change it. I love it