Desktop environments and Window managers
The desktop environment in Alpine have two main flavors: official desktop for alpine as Xfce4 and LXDE and community contributed desktops as Mate, DWM also have more options such as special case the very bloated Gnome (that currently recent version uses Wayland).
Please, if find something not easy to understand about integration of the variety of programs, take in consideration further reading at the end of this page to understand important notes about Behavior of Desktop Environments in Linux
So you can choose from those options:
Alpine Desktops: Official Desktop
There's two official supported desktops, XFCE Desktop Environment and LXDE Desktop, that last make also optional the Openbox Window Manager.
- Alpine Newbies XFCE Desktop Environment
- Alpine Newbies LXDE Desktop Environment
- Alpine Newbies Openbox Window Manager
Alpine Desktops: Community Contributions
There's some contributions desktop available using the Community Repository Packages like the [Alpine Newbies MATE Desktop Environment|MATE Desktop environment]] due some others need Wayland that has some compatibility problems:
Alpine Desktops: Upstream and external ones
All of the original upstream desktop can be installed by the traditional Unix-like method by downloading and compiling it:
Alpine Desktops: multimedia
After have your preferred desktop you can also improvement to your desktop with:
- Alpine multimedia for users (Audio and video multimedia related software and setup)
- Alpine multimedia for editing and amateurs (Amateur related such editing and converting tools)
Alpine Desktops: emulation and gamming
Alpine are capable of provide a good platform to play games and enjoy:
- Alpine games packages and options
- Alpine emulators packages and options
- Alpine games from upstreams sources
- Alpine emulators from upstreams sources
Tutorial series
| Previous required | What's next to read |
|---|---|
| Alpine newbie apk packages | Alpine Newbies: Xorg and Openbox |
Behavior of Desktop Environments in Linux
The popularity of Linux in desktop computers and laptops has been increasing BUT that's a only false behavior.. there's two factors that indicates that:
- Because Linux desktop distributions are not usually distributed by retail sale, there are no sales numbers that indicate the number of users. Desktop computers and phones are ruled by M$ and Google so far.
- The main offers are focused in server and many desktops have programs that never find a end in development like Kppp or Firefox OS, or GTKpod; those are projects that works only with deprecated not used in time devices or machines.
You as user will find some very significant differences when integrated some desktops or try to install many desktops programs from source upstream, a very important thing to take in consideration. But "Ah ok, but why that? why not a automatic default etc etc..?" because the focus of the system are efficiency, performance and maximum control of the system, not an automatic behavior not well knowed.
Taking in consideration that the North American-based web-measurement methods produce high Win-like desktop OS numbers and ignore the widespread use of Linux in other parts of the world, no single official Linux desktop exists and all the integration are focused in too many RedHat proposed practices (that ends in M$-like things like systemd.
As pointed in first paragraph, Gnome it's a example of this.. it's used the wayland service and widely integrated with systemd, and Alpine does not use systemd that comes something in compatibility issues. That it's a example why Desktop environment are so difficult to adopt in Linux world and obviously to configured in Alpine systems.