The musl libc makes it a bad choice for general purpose desktop use (look at the number of hacks required to get some version of VSCode running on it for example).
I use Vim as my editor, and yes, programmers who value bloated, un-Unixy tools like VSCode will not find the system accomodating.
Using pre-built proprietary applications is the only thing that requires a little trickery.
I imagine vscode could be built and packaged just fine if someone wanted to.
But yeah I would like to use it on the desktop as well..
When performance doesn't matter I think it's great though.
Off the top of my head, Tiny Core Linux uses glibc and has desktop users as a primary goal.
Their use of musl libc makes it a very poor choice for running python in a container, because it forces a lot of manual rebuilding since the PyPi wheels don't work on Alpine, among other issues [1]
Now we add additional complication "OK, these pip package authors have upstreamed Alpine packages, and these other ones are only on PyPi".
Maybe this approach would work if you can keep your Python dependencies to a small list of well-maintained packages
Edit: Just got inspired and went to the contributing page.
Think I'll start using it to develop with Vim in a VM locally and see where things go from there.
It's not an option for which OS to flash onto my DigitalOcean VM. Getting it going on Raspberry Pi is largely undocumented.
For desktop, it doesn't (officially) support many window managers or desktops.
No big issues so far and I am in the process of migrating my home server to Alpine.
