> In terms of simplicity, Alpine Linux is unpeered. Alpine is the only Linux distribution that fits in my head. The pieces from which it is built from are simple, easily understood, and few in number, and I can usually predict how it will behave in production. The software choices, such as musl libc, are highly appreciated in this respect as well, lending a greater degree of simplicity to the system as a whole.

I'd really disagree here. Two choices that Alpine made can be really nasty to debug or work around if you are unaware of using Alpine - especially if you're extending from some Docker image that extends from another Docker image that has Alpine as core:

1. musl libc. It's not binary compatible with libc and many Docker image builders don't bother to ship the libc-compat package which means if you're adding (for example) some Java library that has native parts depending on libc, you'll get weird errors.

2. busybox as default shell instead of a real bash. Way too many external scripts depend on various degrees of bash features.