Desktop environments and Window managers

Alpine Linux has no official desktop although setting up a graphical environment is proposed in the post-installation guide. Alpine Linux desktops may meet the needs for general daily desktop use:-

• Fewer packages still require glibc, as numerous popular applications are now available here on musl: libreoffice*, chromium*, Firefox, etc
• Several Alpine Linux desktop environments have been benchmarked to be competitive for both speed and memory
• Arguably, there is a reduced attack surface through the use of a comparatively lightweight musl and BusyBox system core

All window managers and desktop environments that are available in Alpine Linux are listed on this page. A quick installation using the setup-desktop script is available for several desktops.

Tip: For servers, consider using Alpine Configuration Framework (ACF) for security considerations in that use case.

Desktop environments

A desktop environment (DE) is made of a bundle of programs that share a common graphical user interface (GUI), sometimes described as a graphical shell. A desktop environment typically consists of icons, windows, toolbars, folders, wallpapers and desktop widgets, and might also provide drag-and-drop functionality.

• budgie*
• COSMIC
• GNOME
• KDE Plasma
• lomiri*
• Lumina
• LXQt
• MATE
• Xfce

Mobile/tablet UI

Certain desktop environments have been ported for use as mobile user interfaces (UI) while other mobile/tablet UIs may have been developed using other existing unix toolkits. Convergent desktop environments are designed with a view to be consistent regardless of the platform used (pc, mobile, tablet, etc) such as the aforementioned lomiri environment.

• phosh* - Wayland shell for GNOME on mobile devices.
• plasma-mobile* - Mobile UI using a KDE Plasma foundation.
• sxmo* - Minimalist mobile Linux environment.

Window managers

A window manager is software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system in a graphical user interface. In the case of Wayland, these are called compositors because they additionally perform the task of a compositing window manager.

Almost all components of a desktop need to be added manually by the user. Both stacking (a.k.a. floating) and tiling/dynamic layouts are commonly used for window management.

WM Name	Protocol	Style	Toolkit	Inspiration
2bwm	X11	Stacking	C/Roff	mcwm
Awesome	X11	Tiling	Lua
berry	X11	Stacking	C
bspwm	X11	Tiling	C
cage	Wayland	Kiosk	C/wlroots	ratpoison
cagebreak	Wayland	Tiling	C/wlroots	ratpoison, cage
compiz	X11	Compositing	C++/C/Python
cwm	X11	Stacking	C
dk	X11	Tiling	C	dwm, bspwm, xmonad
dwl	Wayland	Tiling	C/wlroots	dwm
dwm	X11	Tiling	C
Fluxbox	X11	Stacking	C++	blackbox
flwm	X11	Stacking	C++/FLTK	wm2
gamescope	X11/Wayland	Compositing	C++/C/Lua
goomwwm	X11	Stacking	C/Roff
herbstluftwm	X11	Tiling	C++
Hyprland	Wayland	Tiling	C++
i3	X11	Tiling	C
icewm	X11	Stacking	C++/C/M4
jwm	X11	Stacking	C
kwin	X11/Wayland	Compositing	C++
LabWC	Wayland	Stacking	C/wlroots	Openbox
marco	X11	Stacking	C	metacity
metacity	X11	Compositing	C
mutter	X11/Wayland	Compositing	C
mwm	X11	Stacking	C
niri	Wayland	Tiling	Rust/GLSL/other	PaperWM
Openbox	X11	Stacking	C
pekwm	X11	Stacking	C++/CMake/Perl/C	aewm++
Qtile	X11/Wayland	Tiling	Python
ratpoison	X11	Kiosk	C
river-classic/River	Wayland	Tiling	Zig	dwm, xmonad
spectrwm	X11	Tiling	C	xmonad, dwm
Sway	Wayland	Tiling	C/wlroots	i3
sxmo-dwm	X11	Tiling	C	dwm
twm	X11	Tiling	C
wayfire	Wayland	Stacking	C++/wlroots	compiz
Weston	Wayland	Stacking	C
windowmaker	X11	Stacking	C/Shell/M4/Perl/Makefile/Emacs Lisp/other	NeXTSTEP
xfwm4	X11	Compositing	C/Makefile/Meson/other

See also

• Post Installation
• Wayland
• Xorg
• Display manager
• Desktop environment - Archwiki
• Desktop environment - Gentoo Wiki