Alpine Linux (in lightweightness), but glibc?
Yes, I know so much of Alpine's lightweightness comes from not using glibc.
But still, the other options I see are far from being slimmed down. Debian, Ubuntu server, CentOS... They all could use some cuts.
What's the most slimmed down non-desktop distro that still has a glibc base? I honestly don't care if it has its own package manager (build tool handles this for me). Just wanna use it in containers for running server apps.
https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless
What runtime do you need? If it’s Node.js, the “slim” Docker images are lightweight and based on Debian. (for example
node:lts-slim)https://www.chainguard.dev/
May be worth looking at distroless containers.
You can completely customize Gentoo Linux to be what you want it to be and slim it down to what you need.
My experience with gentoo docker images is that they're pretty big. I'm not sure why. Maybe the build system or the python deps make it big. I tried squashing the image layers and it was still big, so it isn't that.