Agree— the justification given in the article is needing the environment set up in order to port some software to it, but you don't need a development environment for that, only a build environment. Using containers or even just a chroot (https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Installing_Alpine_Linux_in...) would be far more straight forward.

Now, if you want to try native Alpine as your desktop just for the fun of it, that's fine, but it's going to be a pretty constrained environment, and may not have been worth the several hours it took to get it going.

It's a simple, elegant system that does what I need. And needing so little resources really makes a difference even when you have a more powerful machine.

Like emulating x86 on iOS[1], for example?

[1]: https://github.com/tbodt/ish

Something about using the words “emulating x86 on iOS” and “daily driver” together doesn’t sit right with me...