@Brucehankins lxqt sadly was not ready for primetime but XFCE was so it's been a great adventure with Alpine. I mean, it's been a week. Many do call it a 'server build distro' and just as many call it a daily fulltime desktop.I call it my 'tinkerer' distro. Feels cool to enable your own services to start and even choose your services. And most everything havingto do with config (you need to config a lot🙂) is done in the CLI. I would not have been so confident once upon a time.
It's a CLI-driven life over there with enough GUI to keep one from bailing. Solus is the AUR compared to Alpine and that's cool. They have chromium and firefox as gooey browsers and then they curate 6 more vim/keyboard browsers--what does that tell you🙂?
They do have Flatpak support but I've stayed very conservative with it so far. It's that kind of distro. It's reputation is security first and that's apparent in how the guts are configured. The OpenRC is fast fast fast.
The only thing I hate about the XFCE4-panel is it WILL NOT show you active apps (like plank) so I have a built in redundancy with the taskbar icons. I'd like to solve that one but it's not critical. They do curate Latte but it doesn't render (invisible) and that, strangely, is a common bug....Flatpak has no dock which is also strange. I downloaded the github Plank tarball and will try to DIY.
So to circle back to your 'server build' comment--it stuck with me: its seems half the community feels this is a strict secure server distro and the other half use it DD. In that its identity gets a little muddied.
I boot into when there's a lull because I like to tinker. Dig it.
I guess that's my review as well as a conversation with bruce (and whoever else is reading). Will get a screen shot later to conclude this screed.