Comments about Alpine as a desktop system

Some comments about Alpine, after a month of experimentation with it:

- It's very fast, both booting and running
- The documentation is pretty awful. Even topics that are covered are so poorly written as to be, in some cases, nearly useless. I have finally pieced together what needs to be done to install with a custom partitioning scheme with or without dual booting. I attempted to add what I learned to the wiki, but it vaporized. I'm quite sure I saved the page. So I'm trying to help, but not succeeding thus far.
- strptime does not work correctly. %F has problems. When I have time, I will do some detective work and submit a bug report.
- gdb has problems, some of them already noted in the bug database, e.g., Bug #4075.
- the installer lets you choose a wireless network interface, but doesn't, as far as I can tell, support setting up wpa. I may be wrong, but I believe that network access is needed during the install, so I've been working around this problem by installing with the machine connected via ethernet and then fixing up the wireless post-install.

Unfortunately, the strptime issue is a show-stopper for me, as are the gdb troubles. My interest in Alpine was the security aspect of the system (I'm typing this on an OpenBSD system) and OpenBSD would not run on the machine where the Alpine troubles above arose (a Lenovo x250; I think the OpenBSD Intel video driver is old and buggy and it kills the system on that machine; Alpine works fine in that department). I will continue to watch your progress, but given the current issues I've run into, I can't use the system.

/Don Allen