Arch? Arch ships packages with debug symbols and docs included, and takes over a hundred MB for just a base install! Alpine is way smaller; base image under 10MB, packages broken apart so you only get binaries unless you ask for more, linked with musl to make it even smaller.

EDIT: This is meant to be a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I seriously do prefer Alpine over literally every other Linux distro I've yet seen for minimalism. Also geared towards embedded-type work.

Fair enough, and you're quite right about Alpine being geared more for embedded. For general use I find Alpine a bit of a pain due to lack of systemd (bring on the hate ;)), and of course lack of docs hurts usability a bit. With regard to debug symbols, I like what Redhat and Debian are doing with an embedded build id linking binaries to separate debug packages.

yeah come on, don't bring Alpine in the mix, we were talking about Ubuntu, not DamnSmallLinux. Alpine is great, no doubt, but it's in a class of its own.