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, as lesser use cases now require glibc, several Alpine Linux desktop environments have been benchmarked to be competitive for both speed and memory, and arguably, there is a reduced attack surface through the use of musl and BusyBox.
All window managers and desktop environments that are available in Alpine Linux are listed in this page. A quick installation using the setup-desktop script is available for several desktops.
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 desktop widgets and might also provide drag and drop.
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. A stacking (a.k.a. floating) or tiling/dynamic layout is 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 | 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 |