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

Note: To Install any desktop environment, enable the community repository. Setup-desktop script referred in Quickstart Installation automatically does this for you.

Quickstart Installation

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

# setup-desktop

On running the above command, you will be prompted to select a desktop environment.

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

Once you have chosen a desktop environment, this script installs the chosen desktop along with all the necessary packages, firefox browser and adds the necessary services to run on startup. You can reboot when complete and the system will boot into a graphical login screen with the desktop environment. Depending on the desktop chosen, the script also activates the necessary services like dbus, elogind, login manager etc..

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

# cat /sbin/setup-desktop