I think most of my users figured out that my blog post in the week was an April Fools Joke. Certainly not stopping work in ArchBang unless a government agency has other ideas.
Have been working on a new project for a couple of weeks now and wanted to share what I have so far with you all.
Why Alpine?
Alpine brings some genuinely compelling things to the table. It is fast, light, and security focused by design. The apk package manager is remarkably fast. Installed on real hardware the difference is noticeable — boot times, memory usage, disk footprint. Best of all it uses OpenRC instead of Systemd.
Live Desktop
GreenBang uses labwc as its Wayland compositor — a floating window manager in the spirit of Openbox, which many ArchBang users will find immediately familiar. Waybar provides the panel, foot terminal along with pcmanfm as a file manager. NetworkManager handles networking just as you would expect.
Honest About Its Limits
Alpine does have limits worth knowing about. The live session runs entirely in RAM so on modest hardware space is tight — 2GB is recommended for a comfortable live experience. The package repository is smaller than Arch so occasionally you may hit a wall. musl compatibility means some software behaves differently or is unavailable.
But install it to disk and the picture changes considerably. It is fast, clean, and gets out of your way.
Early Days
This is a beta release. Have not included Firefox yet as it reduces image size and build times. Am working on installer but needs more testing before it is ready for general use. For now boot the live ISO, kick the tyres, and let me know what you think. Generally I have only tested in a Virtual Machine so I do know that wired networking is fine, wireless will need testing as I am at this early stage unsure if I have all the wifi modules present.
EDIT: Should say autologin is disabled for testing so you need to use user: live with password: live at log in prompt.
So I am basically saying do not expect too much at this point.
Am really hoping that I can with your help make this work and be a viable alternative to ArchBang. Comments, feedback and mucho dollars welcome.
Stay safe …