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
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
Yea it would run on it linke any other distro, but you wouldn’t be able to multi task. I reasently installed Debian 32bit on an lenovo ideapead from 2013 with a 1 core 2 threads at 1.2ghz, 2G of ram and a HDD it runs KDE Plasma and will load anything as your pations are strong enough
But you could also run Alpine it will probably use less ram then debian. But I am farmiliar with apt, systemd and gnu software so yea. It is easier for me to give it to my small step sis as a research device with Firefox. I think Debian with KDE plasma uses about 630MB and with xfce around 300-400MB. But I think she is better of with KDE as she primary uses windows in school and it looks more like it
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.
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?
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.
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.
I would recommend using librewolf thorium for normal task and if the site doesnt work with it i use thorium. Librewolf is slower than thorium but it is for me the better default version of Firefox. Loading yt is really slow with librewolf so I use freetube or invidious to watch content.
I’ve tried installing thorium but I can’t get it to compile correctly and I don’t wanna sit there forever trying to get it working so I just gave up and installed chrome
So on their github are appimages, .rpm and .deb available. Idk if you can convert .deb or .rpm files to alpine compatible packages but the appimage should run eververe
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. :)
Yes sound is working perfectly once you install pipewire you just add /usr/libexec/pipewire-launcher to your auto start for whatever de or wm you are using
![[Xfce] Switched to Alpine today](https://i.imgur.com/aXAOL91.png){kind=link}
Add comment