Alpine Linux containers can be as low as 8MB in size. Virtualisation has a cost, that decreases every year. I disagree - many people want an efficient system where the package manager handles it - Arch linux.

In my use case - I started running Arch Linux and installing the packages I want - however aarch64 w/ prop Mesa drivers = bad time. too few AUR packages has aarch64 binaries - would end up compiling nearly everything. eventually I snapped trying to build my own PKGBUILD for printer drivers (that worked on my arch/hardware) instead of just using the provided install script that had ubuntu aarch64 support.

while a sleek minimalist system, ticking smoothly, is really nice - to get to that "happy place" on many bits of hardware can be tricky. this constantly getting stuck and having side effects across different programs on my system led to me taking the same approach I take deploying in production. just install stock os, get docker, then run docker compose pointing to your persisted config/data.