Check ublue approach like for example in this repo: https://github.com/ublue-os/beyond

In other words, leverage native OCI containers.

Gnome Console since it is consistent with the rest of Gnome and works well enough.

Yes, I thrive in it.

Thank you for indulging me! I tried Alpine for a moment with Sway but it was really bare and I had some issues with setting up seatd and/or elogind to ensure some usual niceties like auto-mounting of usb drives etc. I was curious how is daily-driving it experienced by others.

How do you handle lack of systemd? Do you use elogind or seatd? Do you package some things yourself considering Alpine isn’t popular as a desktop distribution?