`FROM debian:jessie` costs 53 MiB. (And by the way, please upgrade to Stretch at the earliest convenience.) `FROM alpine` costs 2 MiB. When you need to send container images across the globe on shitty connections, this matters a lot.

Actually, one of the first commands by default when container is run, is to fetch about 330Mb of compressed toolchain.

I didn't expect myself to ever say this, but: Our Openstack containers are much leaner than that. (Swift ends up at ~95 MiB for example.)

Generally speaking, building an LFS, you can freely choose what software to include or omit, and where there are multiple pieces of software that solve the same problem, you can choose which one to use. (Of course, you are stuck with the work of making all this work, but that is what this is all about: Learning what makes a Linux system tick.)