If you use a `-slim` debian docker image variant, it won't have the manpages (or most locales, and apt will be stripped down, etc, etc).

I think you can achieve the same thing on bare metal by being careful to tell it not to install a bunch of base package sets.

Alpine is more container-focused than debian, so I imagine they default to something closer to `-slim`, but I haven't tried installing it on bare metal or in a VM.

On Debian some packages come with the manual, but have the info-pages as a *-doc (like coreutils), some packages come with basic manual and have extra ones on the doc package (like linux-image), some packages have no documentation at all on the main package (AFAIK nothing on the minimal installation), and some packages bundle everything.