this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Alpine was never meant as a desktop distribution.
I've been using it as daily driver since four or five years now. At first it was a bit difficult, we had to wait for patches for musl a lot for common desktop binaries. But now I don't even remember waiting for an update and I don't have to compile some tools myself anymore. Everything is in the repo. Yes i agree, I don't need much, it just works flawlessly with River + Foot + Firefox + Helix and I try to keep it minimal. No games, not much graphical tools. apk is such a magical tool. Never broke my edge install with it... Like Arch did with AUR. And the last install that I did recently on a remote server was just so easy with 'setup-alpine'... Way better than five years ago. The only drawback is the documentation I think... I'm using the gentoo one, which is perfect for Alpine.
I mean you exactly underline what I said. You can use anything for desktop usage, depending on your requirements. But Alpine is not meant to be used like this. Or with requirements like yours, you basically could use anything, there is no really advantage of using Alpine for your specific needs compared to many other distros out there.
I am not saying nobody should use Alpine on desktop, its just false "advertising" if you proclaim its perfectly fine to be run a s such.