Tip: Before installing a desktop, you may want to create a non-privileged user account for security reasons.

Note: To Install any desktop environment, ensure that community repository is enabled. Quickstart Installation utility setup-desktop automatically does this.

Quickstart Installation

The Alpine Linux utility for setting up any desktop quickly is setup-desktop. Most commonly used desktop environements can be quickly installed with this utility, which is part of the standard Alpine Linux installation package alpine-conf.

# setup-desktop

On running the above command, you will be prompted for the desktop name.

Which desktop environment? ('gnome', 'plasma', 'xfce', 'mate', 'sway' or 'none') [none]

Once you have chosen the desktop environment, this utility installs the chosen desktop along with all the necessary dependencies, standard utilities, commonly used applications and firefox as browser. This utility also activates the necessary services like dbus etc..

To view all the packages that are installed by the utility for the chosen desktop you can issue the below command:

# cat /sbin/setup-desktop