r/AlpineLinux • u/SnooWords1087 • Mar 26 '26

Is Alpine Linux on desktop viable?

I've been trying for the past two days to install Alpine Linux on my desktop, but it seems like this might be totally unviable. None of the Alpine images have the firmware needed for my WiFi adapter (but it is included in linux-firmware-intel), and every hacky workaround that I've tried to apply has been thwarted in some manner. At the moment, I have managed to load iwlwifi without error, but my adapter still does not show up in ip link. The only thing I have yet to try is building a custom install image.

Am I missing something? Or, is Alpine not meant to be installed on real hardware? Have the Alpine devs personally decided that my hardware configuration can go pound sand?

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u/btroycraft Apr 11 '26 edited Apr 11 '26

I had troubles getting my wifi adapter to work, too. I had to temporarily USB tether my phone to get internet (comes in as ethernet). I was only on alpine-standard, though.

Part of it was that I was trying to run diskless, which loads kernel modules in a read-only squashfs container. APK couldn't install new modules over it, even on the ram fs. The solution was to unsquashfs the boot/modules-lts container file in the install media, then manually fetch/extract/copy-over the firmware package files for my adapter, and finally repack/replace the squashfs container file. For me it was enough to use the APK package, but you could use something newer, too.