I’m slowly but surely working on making a phone with a RISC-V SBC. I installed Linux From Scratch on my Lichee RV board and am now taking a break to get some other stuff in my life taken care of. Once I have some more time I’m going to work on getting a tiny, physical keyboard set up for it.
Alpine is very lightweight. I think it was built so that it would run well inside docker containers, which means it should be fairly easy for low-end computers to run it.
Afaik, it doesn’t come with a DE out of the box, so it won’t be very user-friendly
From what I hear, it just makes things slower, and it’s proprietary. Basically exactly what OP said. It also makes a ton of loop devices, so if you’re working with them yourself it’s kind of annoying.