r/AlpineLinux • u/Artistic_Crazy_7120 • Jul 17 '26

Started experimenting with Alpine Linux as a desktop system.

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Last year I started experimenting with Alpine on an older intel laptop and I liked it a lot. Like to see how it behaves on my laptop so I added a drive.

So far it' s running pretty sweet. It's good to have flatpak apps when they can' t run native.

87 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

20 comments sorted by

9

u/cassiofb_dev Jul 17 '26

its awesome, I used to use it in my working machine until company made me install ubuntu :/

7

u/wowsomuchempty Jul 17 '26

Mine mandated MWS.

(Urghghggggghhhhgghhghh).

Used to run alpine + niri

1

u/lproven Jul 17 '26

"MWS"?

Do you mean WSL?

5

u/wowsomuchempty Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26

Nope. As an admin, my machine must be MWS (managed windows - I don't even have admin).

I left windows behind in 2005. God, it's horrible.

2

u/lproven Jul 18 '26

I don't know what that means, and your answer does not tell me. What is MWS? Starting with, what does it stand for?

3

u/wowsomuchempty Jul 19 '26

Managed Windows Service.

You are not admin on your own device.

4

u/semedilino073 Jul 17 '26

You could dual boot, but I guess you’d still need to work on Ubuntu……

3

u/Schwerverbrecher Jul 17 '26

chroot would be an easier option

2

u/Artistic_Crazy_7120 Jul 18 '26

You can always use flatpak for apps compiled with glibc.

6

u/Holiday_Floor_2646 Jul 17 '26

I daily drive alpine with no issues, I was an arch user before but I needed something minimal with stable release schedule so thats why I switched to alpine.

2

u/Artistic_Crazy_7120 Jul 18 '26

So do I. I just added a new drive for Alpine.

2

u/GenericFoodService Jul 19 '26

I made the switch from Debian just a few months ago. I do a lot of gaming, audio engineering, and programming, and it works extremely well for me.

2

u/tangymonk 28d ago

And how do you manage to game on Alpine? Do you have Steam through flatpak?

1

u/GenericFoodService 28d ago

Indeed.

1

u/pedrolucasp 13d ago

I can't make Steam work on Alpine for some reason. It used to, until something something, bubblewrap and now I can't

1

u/Artistic_Crazy_7120 Jul 19 '26

Yes here to. The repos are larger than I first thought and flatpak apps can be used otherwise.

2

u/Zzyzx2021 Jul 21 '26

KDE was a wildly unstable experience for me on Alpine, at least as of recently the Wayland session automatically semi-recovers...

Makes more sense to use a lighter DE or WM on Alpine.

1

u/Artistic_Crazy_7120 Jul 22 '26

So what made it unstable?

1

u/saulius2 26d ago

I suggest you to try KDE on r/AdelieLinux. It's not as lightweight, but my impressions was very good so far.

2

u/Opposite_Eagle6323 Jul 28 '26

Interesting to see Alpine Linux being used on laptops because before there were some issues. I am running Chimera Linux which uses Alpine's APK package manager and overall is very similar to Alpine Linux.

Might install Alpine Linux someday