Ask HN: Alpine Linux as a Desktop?

A long time ago, I was a Gentoo user. I liked the fine-grained control over exactly which packages where installed (and managed to live with the compile times by starting them before bed). What finally drove me away from Gentoo was the constant clobbering of my configuration files.

I've been watching Alpine Linux and appreciate both the security posture and minimalist attitude and agree they're a good distribution for creating Docker images. Going through their documentation, there also seems to be plenty of information on running Alpine as a desktop system.

So I'm hoping one or more HN'ers can validate or refute my observation. What are the pros and cons? Any pitfalls I should watch out for? Any specifically for XFCE (which is what I'm currently running on Linux Mint)?

Thanks ...