Should I instead be using Alpine? If someone is isn't distro aficionado and is utilizing "mainstream" docker images, what's the recommendation?
Not sure if you're trying to make your own containers or not, but stick to the stock Docker Hub containers as much as possible. If there's an "official" Redis container, use that, regardless of the base image. Since it's supported, other people will be fixing bugs and upgrading things so you don't have to.
> If someone is isn't distro aficionado and is utilizing "mainstream" docker images, what's the recommendation?
For non-container stuff, CentOS is the "enterprisey" distro that's safest in case you one day have to support an app that only supports RHEL (and it's the base for Amazon Linux, in case you use AWS).
For container stuff, it's a toss-up between Ubuntu and Debian; I'd use Ubuntu for developer-oriented stuff, and Debian for anything else. You can of course use Alpine for containers, but there are some maintenance/development costs that come as well, so I only recommend Alpine if you really need to save space.
If you're using headless boxes for servers then Ubuntu or the house variety of the cloud platform of your choice is almost certainly best.
If you're looking for employee workstations I would go for something that looks and feels like Windows like Linux Mint or Kubuntu.
Ubuntu comes with snaps. If you don't use snaps, they are consuming a not insignificant portion of boot time. Use Debian if you need something glib-based. If you must use Ubuntu, make sure you are using slim: you don't need manpages etc. in a production container.
Overall boot time is affected by image size, because your cluster has to download that image from $SERVER. Alpine is smaller than most, scratch is even better (if you can pull it off). Building containers with Nix can result in stupidly small images.
Its not clear-cut, but hopefully that helps you make a choice.
For shame, but I'm leaving my comment as is