Alpine + mist · pre-alpha
A curated desktop for the machine you already have.
Alpymist is an opinionated Wayland desktop on Alpine Linux. It runs Hyprland where the hardware can, composites on the CPU where it cannot, and ships as nothing but signed packages.
The name is Alpine plus mist, the haze on the mountains. It is also a pun on alchemist, which is roughly what turning a fifteen-year-old laptop back into a usable desktop amounts to.
One desktop, three renderers
The same keybindings, theme, panel and launcher, drawn by Hyprland on a good GPU, by labwc on a weak one or on the CPU alone, and by i3 where Wayland cannot run. The installer probes the machine and says why it chose what it chose.
Read the decision →signed packagesNo curl | sh. Ever.
Every piece of Alpymist, down to the wallpaper, is an apk in a repository whose index is signed with a key CI never sees. You boot a signed ISO, or you apk add it onto Alpine.
Read the decision →rustFirst-party code in Rust
The installer, splash, menu and tier probe are Rust. unsafe is denied workspace-wide and confined to one short file that talks to EGL, where there is no other way.
Read the decision →musl + flatpakA base you can audit
Pure musl Alpine underneath. Proprietary and glibc-only software runs through Flatpak, in a sandbox, rather than natively beside it.
Read the decision →Hardware tiers
Picked by probing, never by guessing
At install and again on first boot, Alpymist checks what the GPU, driver and memory can actually do and picks a tier. Anything it cannot confirm counts against the machine: a desktop that starts slowly can be fixed, one that does not start cannot.
FullHyprlandAccelerated DRM, GL ES 3.2 or newer, 3 GiB of memory
Animations, blur, Ghostty as the terminal.
Litelabwc on GLES2Accelerated DRM, GL ES 2.0 or newer, 1.5 GiB of memory
A stacking desktop that still uses the GPU.
Potatolabwc on pixmanKernel modesetting, but no GPU worth rendering with
Wayland composited entirely on the CPU.
LegacyX11 and i3No DRM/KMS device at all
A fallback that still boots to a usable session.
Status
Early, and honest about it
The build pipeline runs end to end: CI builds a bootable ISO, boots it in QEMU and checks the tier it reports. Packages are published to a signed repository. It is not yet something to install on a machine you depend on.