What problems did you encounter? I installed Alpine on some laptops for desktop use and never had a problem except with one HP small netbook where the energy management seems broken as the kernel rewrites somewhere the screen backlight value with a value of 4 (= almost invisible) as soon as I pull the DC plug but doesn't update it when I plug it back. This also happens with ACPI and all power management uninstalled, so I sorta solved this by installing ACPI and making scripts to echo the right value back. This problem aside, I could install a lot of non trivial things, including for example WINE and Yabridge to use music plugins. Unless the system pulled them unbeknownst to me, I made no use of flatpaks and the like. The more I use Alpine, the more I like it.