Prerequisites

Install AlpineLinux
Create a user account (optional but recommended)
Enable the Community repository

Installing packages

Install basic desktop system and gnome packages.

# setup-desktop gnome

It will take care of installing the basic packages and setting up the display manager.

If you want, you can install additional GNOME apps for a more complete GNOME experience with:

# apk add gnome-apps-extra

And even all of GNOME games with:

# apk add gnome-games-collection

Enabling GNOME Shell screen recording

For the embedded screen recording in GNOME Shell to work, you will need some additional packages:

# apk add pipewire wireplumber gst-plugin-pipewire

Enabling GNOME Software

For GNOME Software to be able to manage APK packages, it needs the apk-polkit-server service working. To enable it and start it up:

# rc-update add apk-polkit-server default && rc-service apk-polkit-server start

Updating GNOME packages

Most GNOME apps and core systems follow a common versioning pattern, and have a similar release cadence. In order to reduce the workload on maintainers, the gnome-aports-utils project exists. It contains a series of scripts that can be used to detect changes on GNOME-related projects, and commit them. When doing major GNOME updates, and doing minor updates on many projects, these scripts can help warranty that no project is forgotten, and reduce the time needed to build and test the upgrades. We recommend everybody to use and contribute to that repository instead of pushing updates for every GNOME component individually.

Troubleshooting

If you are unable to log in, check /var/log/gdm/greeter.log, there may be info there from X that indicates failed modules, etc.

If GNOME Terminal doesn't start, add the following to /etc/profile.d/locale.sh: LANG=en_US.UTF-8 and reboot.

If the on-screen keyboard shows up in GDM after installing other UIs such as Phosh, you need to disable it by opening the Accessibility menu (top right) when you are in the GDM login screen. You can disable the on-screen keyboard there. Or set org.gnome.desktop.a11y.applications screen-keyboard-enabled to false for the gdm user with dconf

Slow applications or rendering issues

Please note that some applications, i.e. Gnome Web (Epiphany), may require the installation of libraries related to hardware acceleration to work correctly.

In quite some cases, this can be solved by installing mesa-gles (OpenGL ES). Check if you you have issues loading the shared library libGLESv2.so.2. If so, you can install it with:

# apk add mesa-gles