My Archlinux based LiveUSB setup comes around to 1GB and has Libreoffice, Wine, Firefox/Chromium. That said, there are some questionable dependencies in Archlinux lately. For example, mpv now requires smbclient, which then pulls python2.7.
feh WARNING: 01.mp3 - No Imlib2 loader for that file format
Its ports are where FreeBSD really shines. They're something in between Arch's ABS and Gentoo's portage. I just wish there was someway to say "install binutils via pkg, and only compile gcc itself".
You can also `make package` to, well, make your own binary package (it will be in /usr/ports/lang/gcc/work/pkg) to distribute to other machines. Or use poudriere to setup a proper package build server.