I use Alpine as my desktop daily driver. The setup-desktop [link] and setup-devd [link] scripts that come with Alpine are convenient for setting up a desktop environment.
There still is some extra work to get things working but the wiki has a good tutorial page which is a good start for setting up a desktop environment on Alpine.
I do think Alpine is quite flexible beyond embedded systems. That's a lot of effort to include desktop environments in their OS or even in major version release notes.