To Canonical's credit, minimal Ubuntu is pretty small, unfortunately it bloats quickly when you start installing packages for dependencies. Minimal Ubuntu clocks in around 30MB, comparable Alpine images are around 5MB, both are significantly smaller than a typical distro installation. Packaged our software on Ubuntu takes 400MB and around 45MB on Alpine, so the base image for minimal Ubuntu is 6x larger than Alpine and the packaged image is nearly 10x larger than Alpine.