Small optimized container image sizes is one of the reasons.

  alpine image is ~5 MB. [1]
  clearlinux image is ~80 MB. [2]

[1]: https://hub.docker.com/_/alpine

[2]: https://hub.docker.com/_/clearlinux/tags

Alpine also runs on ARM platforms, and by using musl instead of glibc it consumes a lot less resources, at the price of some (thankfully rare) incompatibilities here and there. For reference: https://wiki.musl-libc.org/functional-differences-from-glibc...

Link for anyone interested in Clear Linux: https://clearlinux.org/

Had heard of Alpine and used it plenty for containers, yet hadn't heard of Clear Linux before. Nowadays I just use Ubuntu for my container images (due to the same environment as my dev machine which simplifies things for me), but there's also a lot of benefit and elegance in more lightweight alternatives.

Docker images ...

https://github.com/search?q=org%3Adocker-library+alpine&type...