As someone who thinks Alpine images are a huge pain in the rear, are abberant systems that causes huge pain (it changed Postgres's sort order on us for example), Debian-slim was my go to choice.

Frustratingly though, it feels like most apps built on Debian and debian-slim end up downloading a bunch of different layers. Often over a dozen. It just makes me so sad.

And these layers do seem to shift and churn. I keep telling Alpine lovers their small images dont matter because the base layers will almost always be resident. But the Debian images just feel like they are ever shifting.