1 yr. ago • 96%

[Xfce] Switched to Alpine today

45 comments

Now just stop using Chrome and you'll be golden

28
- Haha 😄 yea i use Firefox mostly but I have chrome for school stuff and it loads yt a lot faster
  
  7
  
  Recommend using Vivaldi if you need something chromium. Has the best god damn tab management I've ever tried at least.
  
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I'm curious: What made you choose Alpine specifically and what were you using before?

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- I mainly chose Alpine because of my horrible hardware, I only have 4gb of ram and a Haswell Celeron so I wanted something really light while still being usable. As for what I was using before it was Debian but I have jumped around a lot, Arch, Debian, Fedora, Mint, FreeBSD, etc.
  
  15
  
  Understandable. I also had a weaker PC until recently and love what Linux was able to do with it even though I haven't personally tested Alpine. Your rice is also really beautiful for such a minimal system.
  
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Wait, Alpine as a daily driver? How is it treating you? Any apparent differences?

How much of time did you spend on your setup? Love it BTW.

11
- Treating me very well so far, very lightweight since it's not using gnu coreutils or systemd. As for the setup they have a very well-put-together installer script just boot, log into root, type setup-alpine and follow the steps on screen, I think they also have a setup script for a bunch of desktop environments but I chose to install mine manually, although this was still very easy because of the surprisingly good documentation especially the wiki with many entries explaining step by step how to install different desktop environments, this combined with the verrryyy fast package manager makes for a great experience even on the desktop. :)
  
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  Thanks! Did you get sound working? Was pipewire part of the setup whilst installing Gnome?
  
  I'm planning to use Void for my desktop and Alpine for my servers. Thanks!
  
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Pretty good distro, tbh. Should be a pleasant experience if you don't hesitate to dig into packaging software or use flatpak occasionally: I've used it for a short while, but switched due to quite small number of packages in the repos.

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It’s not complete without an illustrated schoolgirl in tight leggings.

9
- very true it is the icing on top of every UN*X rice :)
  
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  Why the * in Unix? Sorry if I am naive 🙃
  
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- came for the picture, stayed for "alpine with a desktop?"
  
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Alpine is cool. apk is freakishly fast. I mean, like FREAKishly fast.

PostmarketOS is using Alpine as their base as well.

I had problems with containers though. I would like to revisit it and see if I can get them working

I like seeing work being put into musl as well.

Boxkit, which is Alpine based, is probably the most useful OCI container OOTB: https://github.com/ublue-os/boxkit

Lots of cool stuff. Don't stop the learnin'

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Nice rice 👌🌾

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Love that wallpaper, would you be willing to share it?

6
- https://wallhaven.cc/w/6dlpr7
  
  5
- I second that, really like it a lot!
  
  3
Cool. I also iluse Alpine as my desktop.

Question though. When I use Xfce, I don't have a network monitor in my systray. What did you install to make this work? Or did you jus use the setup-desktop script?

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- After you install and get to your Xfce desktop just follow these steps
  
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  Oh, I should know this haha, I made the last edit on that page...
  
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Lookin' good!

3
Alpine on a chromebox/chromebook?

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- yea
  
  2
  
  Could it run on a old desktop? (Core 2 duo, 3gb ram, HDD, ati sapphire x1650)
  
  I don't have anything else and windows is absolutely shit on it (yes it's a 64 bit system)
  
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I am a simple man. I see anime rice, I upvote.

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Clean, looks great! I'm curious is this more lightweight than xfce mint (my prefered choice to bring back some life to old notebooks)? If it is why? I understand alpine is best choice to build light container images but I don't know how it behave as desktop

Could you share wp?

2
- i think it is lighter than Mint (Xfce) but i havent used Mint (Xfce) so i dont know how much lighter it is exactly, but it uses musl libc which has a much lighter and cleaner code base than glibc and it uses busybox coreutils instead of GNU coreutils and they are again much lighter it is also using OpenRC instead of SystemD for its init system
  
  Wallpaper https://whvn.cc/6dlpr7
  
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Chad Alpine user, I have used it a lot as a desktop OS before, though now I've relegated it to my home server, still great there

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