I typed something incredibly long only for it to all be invalidated because I accidentally refreshed the page.
Here is the 4channel post I found from the archives that I based my original OP off of:
Alpine + distrobox/KVM make a perfectly workable ultra-minimalist desktop distro. You can use an Arch, Debian, or any other distrobox for all the corner cases where musl has no compatibility. Flatpaks are available too. Of course, it’s not a distribution for newcomers, but if you’re barely competent and tech savvy enough, there’s nothing you can’t do on Alpine that you can do on Arch, Fedora, or Ubuntu.
I am setting this up on my host machine, and it seems like a good approach because all you'd have to do is keep the host machine updafed, if you even wanted to keep it updated at all and. it'd be easy because all your host has would be Xorg and Distrobox amongst what other software is present on your host machine
You wouldnt need to upgrade the containers if you only needed one version of software, but you'd likely have this:
Bleeding (Arch, always up to date) Stable (Debian, never updated unless necessary) Olden (Ancient version of Ubuntu for old software that's not available anymore) Host (Alpine Linux as a minimalist host machine)
I have tried several Linux distributions and they all suffer from some kind of forced obsolesence through userland ABI breakage like glibc or dependency hell and so this appears to be the saving grace, or atleast the middle way when it comes to having an unchanging Linux desktop experience that's more reliable and consistent than running Win2k for 15 years straight
Anonymous · 2026-07-11 21:15 [#7800][report] I like this approach. I've been setting up an Artix-dinit install, but after realizing everything I want to do needs an inenumerable amount of libraries and python modules, I decided I may as well install the usual suspects in containers. It's currently using Nix home-manager for the user programs, but as my current daily driver is NixOS, many grievances can be said about the ecosystem, chiefly among them being a 150GB /nix (after hardlinking) and a correlated increase of homosexual symbolism and rust compilation.
I'll report back when I have dinit managing a full disk encrypted Alpine with distrobox installations of Steam and whatever else I use that won't work with musl. I'm toying with the idea of an LFS build, but it's looking mostly like Alpine anyways. Walking through the setup-disk script line-by-line may be a worthwhile exercise if it is not simply extracting a tarball.
Anonymous · 2026-07-11 21:17 [#7803][report] >>18992 eyyyy i swapped to NixOS too at the end. its so fucking good. i can just copy my config over to a USB and nuke my computer and reinstall and it'll be exactly as i left it especially because i symlinked my entire home folder to a dedicated /Storage folder that contains all of the data i download and accumulate and all of my projects AND my nix shit and so copying that to the USB too means i copy my entire computer over
Anonymous · 2026-07-11 21:42 [#7847][report] >>18993 The reproducability of NixOS has completely corrupted me. Being able to setup the entire system with one syntax instead of juggling the entire /etc folder is just too rich. There have been a few attempts at a non-SystemD, fully Nix derived system, but most users don't care how the system works or actively desire systemd-linuxd.
>>18996 I'll rescind that. sixos, according to the author, is mature enough to run his desktops and servers. This twitter screenshot just took all the mojo I had towards Alpine away, reminding me once again that any project used by large companies is full of these types. Maybe I'll get off my ass and learn the standard Nix libraries to get FHS support working.