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Comment by Rapzid | Hacker News Reader

This here. Honestly most orgs with uhh.. Let's say a more mature sense of ROI tradeoffs were doing this from pretty much the very beginning.

Also, Ubuntu 22.04 is only 28.17MB compressed right now so it looks equiv to debian-slim. There are also these new image lines, I can't recall the funky name for them, that are even smaller.

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I'm pushing to go back to Debian from Ubuntu. Canonical's making decisions lately that don't appeal to me, and especially on the server I don't see a clear advantage for Ubuntu vs good ol' rock solid Debian.

Host OS vs container image base shouldn't be the same conversation.

I've done this multiple times when new Debian Stable was released (Bookworm just got released). Its great, until it isn't (ie. you need more up-to-date software). Although to be fair, you might be comparing Ubuntu LTS with Debian releases and the minor Ubuntu releases get short support. Ubuntu is akin to a polished Debian Testing snapshot. I don't like them swapping to Snap either (snappy it ain't).

> There are also these new image lines, I can't recall the funky name for them, that are even smaller.

You might be thinking of the chiselled images. An interesting idea but very much incomplete[1].

[1]: https://github.com/canonical/chisel-releases/issues/34

Yes, that's it! I've been working with .Net a lot recently and recalled Microsoft's announcement about them. Specialized runtime images for JRE, .NEt, Asp.Net, and etc.

why is it so much smaller than debian slim?

It's not, Debian slim is ~28.8MB compressed.

If you want to compare compressed size, then alpine is 3.25MB

The parent comment was comparing Ubuntu and Debian-slim

Fewer features (including less "we've supported doing that for 20 years and we're not cutting it now"), packages separated into parts (ex. where debian might separate "foo" into "foo" for the main package and "foo-dev" for headers, alpine will also break out "foo-doc" with manpages and such), general emphasis on being small rather than full-featured.

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