I am pretty comfortable with suggesting one OS as the "hardware" OS and another OS for the userland... Alpine's design makes it really well suited to "hardware

I am pretty comfortable with suggesting one OS as the "hardware" OS and another OS for the userland... Alpine's design makes it really well suited to "hardware"; I'd even suggest it's probably a good way to run kubernetes or lxd because it's simple and trivial to provision/customize and not full of vendor nonsense. You can use alpine as a "base container" layer, but you'll quickly end up in a world where libc vs musl or "I need a weird package" makes a tiny centos/debian container more appealing. If you've got java or python or ruby or some other complex runtime, just run it in the most commonly used base container and don't go looking for trouble...