Comment by zamadatix

Alpine is great, especially for anything single purposed and headless (be it physical, VM, or container) so long as that thing isn't too tied to glibc. Been around a long time with a stable community (who are mostly using it for containers). It also defaults to a typical versioned release scheme but has the ability to switch to rolling just by changing the repo if you know you need the latest versions.

I once tried to use it as a GUI daily driver on my work laptop (since I was already using it for containers and VMs at work) and found that stretched it a bit too far out of its speciality. It definitely had the necessary packages, just with a lot of rough edges and increased rate of problems (separate from glibc, systemd, or other expected compatibility angles). Plus the focus on having things be statically linked makes really wide (lots of packages) installs negated any space efficiency gains it had.