Sometimes it pays looking over the borders of your plate, as we say here in Germany. Looking at Alpine Linux, which is somewhat popular on servers and for automated installations, you can also use this as a desktop operating system; why not? I’ve tried it in a virtual QEMU/KVM machine on Debian, where I gave it only 2 virtual CPU cores, and also only 2048MB (or 2GB) of RAM. I followed the Alpine Handbook and also this short introduction to it, and so I ended up with a working Gnome desktop in not too much time (first boots take a while, that’s normal). Looks like this, with the actual Gnome 48 desktop:
Nice, and perhaps the fastest installation ever. Not for beginners, but if you’re curious about things like these, give it a try.
And as always, thanks for reading.