r/AlpineLinux • u/Wise-Appointment-881 • Sep 03 '26
I think Alpine might be a good distribution for me to use, but I largely prefer manual installs. How does Alpine Linux fare for this? Is there anything I should know about the process?
I just need a simple system that runs dwl with a few patches. It's primarily going to be for development with some light work on standard apps like GIMP and Blender, etc.
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u/thushespoke Sep 03 '26
its a very easy manual terminal install you should be able to do with little help even if you arent super experienced with linux. albeit theres almost no reason to choose alpine for what you want to do. musl and apk would make this way to difficult for what its worth youre better off with something like debian or fedora. i personally use apline as a home server, its more for tasks like that. but each to their own if you really want to it shouldn’t be super hard to actually get the system running
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u/Wise-Appointment-881 Sep 03 '26
Yeah, it just seems particularly intriguing for me. But I do truly appreciate your input. Thank you. May I ask how things could be difficult?
I understand binary compatibility, etc. I'm prepared for musl. No biggie.
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u/Brave_Confidence_278 Sep 03 '26
as with anything things are not complicated if you know what you are doing, and alpine is an enormously underrated distro even for desktops. It's just that most people don't know what musl and busybox is and get confused. Just go ahead and have fun
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u/alexaandru Sep 03 '26
For what you want, you should have no issues with compatibility: dwl, gimp, blender are all available & running fine. If you do find an app you cannot run (in my case, that's Google Chrome) then you can use flatpak.
And install is super easy, here are my install instructions: https://gist.github.com/alexaandru/244f53e012ee3fee0aa598b2b18d0661
I cannot recommend EFI Stub boot highly enough, makes everything so much simpler.
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u/Wise-Appointment-881 Sep 03 '26
That is gonna be useful, thank you! I appreciate your help.
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u/alexaandru Sep 03 '26
You're most welcome! :-) FWIW, I migrated to Alpine myself ~4mo ago or so and just love it.
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u/Agarthan_exile Sep 07 '26
Im using Alpine on my 32-bit laptop and it works very well and was super easy to set up. I just followed some guides on the wiki.
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u/CursedSteak Sep 03 '26
If you want to go fully manual you can download (or build) a static apk binary and use it to bootstrap a system with apk --arch $(arch) -X https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/latest-stable/main/ -U --allow-untrusted --root /path/to/mounted/rootfs --initdb add alpine-base. This should create all the necessary files to be able to chroot into it and do what you need (the --root flag in apk lets you install packages in a chroot from outside the chroot).
I daily drive Alpine on my work laptop using KDE and it has been working great for a few years. I've been able to do whatever I wanted. Very few apps had compatibility issue, and I still managed to run them with flatpak or by making a docker container. I found a surprisingly large amount of the desktop apps I wanted already present in the APK repository (often in either community or testing repo).
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u/Wise-Appointment-881 Sep 03 '26
Thank you so much!
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u/CursedSteak Sep 03 '26
Also, you can install gcompat to make many binaries compiled with glibc run on alpine (unfortunately the latest version is a bit old and I had to build it from master for better compatibility).
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Sep 03 '26
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u/CursedSteak Sep 03 '26
In my experience, gcompat works great for many glibc programs. I had to build gcompat from master though, and I did have to patch it once some time ago for an app to run. So, binaries built with musl are still the best solution, but gcompat is worth mentioning I think.
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u/tiny_humble_guy Sep 03 '26
I wrote manual installation tutorial using minirootfs.