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.
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.
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.
Speaking of improvements, if you haven't tried KDE in a while, it has become considerably lighter in recent years. It is quite a bit snappier as well.
Skipping the indexing features, it gets pretty close to Xfce, MATE and LXDE in resource usage.
As a person daily-driving it, I promise it does in fact have enough functionality for daily use. And are you sure those are the same people? My impression is that there are two groups; minimalist hackers who want an ultra-light system and build that, and people who want a system that's easy to use for the masses and build that (KDE, GNOME, XFCE). And because it's FOSS and mostly unpaid, people work individually on the things that they directly value, hence the wide range of options.
Come back to the Mate desktop. It's the original Gnome desktop, just like you remember it in 2010, only ported to GTK3. I personally like the Ubuntu-Mate version but the guy running that project has been recently working to port over the specific changes between that and stock Mate desktop to Debian so that will also be a possibility soon.
Give it a look at: https://ubuntu-mate.org
I've not tried to use it as a desktop. I alternate between Void and QubesOS for desktops.
60% of the time it works every time!
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.
It usually works better than doing the opposite (CentOS/Ubuntu server running Alpine containers).
... 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/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 to save the system.
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.
