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Ask HN: Alpine Linux as a Desktop?

6 points by smoyer ↗ HN
A long time ago, I was a Gentoo user. I liked the fine-grained control over exactly which packages where installed (and managed to live with the compile times by starting them before bed). What finally drove me away from Gentoo was the constant clobbering of my configuration files.

I've been watching Alpine Linux and appreciate both the security posture and minimalist attitude and agree they're a good distribution for creating Docker images. Going through their documentation, there also seems to be plenty of information on running Alpine as a desktop system.

So I'm hoping one or more HN'ers can validate or refute my observation. What are the pros and cons? Any pitfalls I should watch out for? Any specifically for XFCE (which is what I'm currently running on Linux Mint)?

Thanks ...

2 comments

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jfkw
Somewhat off-topic:

Fellow longtime Gentoo and recent Alpine user here. I haven't encountered undue conflict burden from configuration file updates. Some projects do churn whitespace etc, in configuration defaults files, which is unfortunate but not specific to any distro.

If an application supports a conf.d style override, I use that, containing only settings which differ from default.

Is there something inherent about Alpine packaging that handles local config differently?

emilburzo
As a former Gentoo-er: why not Archlinux?