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This is always a dilemma for me... Alpine allows for really small packages, but I never got used to its packaging tools (and I don't feel confident writing Dockerfiles with it). A matter of practice I guess. Besides, Docker caches layers so if you're using some common base layer (like Ubuntu or Debian) it's probably already on the machine. So I usually write Dockerfiles as `FROM debian` and then later adapt them to Alpine if they're meant to be distributed.

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Yes, I did like you before. But once I got used to Alpine, apk (its package manager), and ash (its shell), I feel myself at home. Furthermore, in most occasions I find newer updated software on Alpine vs. Debian.

Also besides disk space, I really have no idea how docker manages memory, but my assumption (naive?) is that smaller images will consume less RAM memory. I didn’t benchmark this though.

Sorry for late reply. Depends on what is in the package. Docker is just a thin separation of processes, so the situation is very similar to size of packages on host Linux OS. What matters is the size of binaries and loaded data, which I guess is not that different between distributions.

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