The downside of leaving systemd isn't losing Gnome (although I will miss it); it's losing Dank Linux, Gnome, and Noctalia at the same time. Alpine doesn't have quickshell in its repositories.

Compiling it on my laptop is... possible? Maybe? But then it's a core component of the desktop that has to be manually updated. and that's a pain in the tail feathers I'm not sure I want to deal with.

I'll probably do Alpine and just build a complete desktop on my own, then. But what to use as a window manager? Niri is nice. Wayfire looks cool.

It's quite the two pipe problem.