There are two articles at the bottom of the original article from this post and in one of them they actually advise against a solar still.
Sheesh!
I don’t care how little water they produce anything is better than nothing
it also says drinking urine is a waste of time. That’s not true. You can do it a few times. after that, probably not such a good idea unless you have your water filter in which case you can do it indefinitely. The thing about the solar stills is that you need to build several of them and they work best when you have supplies of non potable water available to distill. If you only have one and you’re throwing bits of cactus in it to distill, it might not be worth the time. The article states that you’ll waste more sweat than it’s worth. That’s why you build it at night or early morning. In the desert, during the day, you should find shade and do as little as possible unless you have lots of potable water.