Subject: Building a KDE Plasma Kiosk Environment

From: Paul <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2024 12:18:00 +0100

Hello,
I'm currently planning to build a reproducible kiosk desktop environment 
for a local club. It will consist of a desktop environment (KDE Plasma 
with static configuration) and some applications (LibreOffice, Spotify, 
etc.).

I'd like to use a reproducible and immutable Alpine installation as the 
base operating system.
I've looked into diskless and data disk mode, but don't think that they 
are suitable because of their ram utilization (AFAIK the packages from 
the Local Package Cache are installed into tmpfs at boot).

My current idea is to use 'alpine-make-rootfs' to build the system as a 
SquashFS, copy it to the disk of the kiosk machine and load it with a 
custom initramfs init script. This may also allow me to implement 
updates by querying a HTTP server in the init script for new squashfs 
images.

Do you know a better / more official / better tested method for this setup?
Do you have any ideas how to improve the setup?

Kind Regards
Paul / pfzetto