You can always build your own with a distro build system like OpenEmbedded, if you want to have ultimate control. But a minbase Debian install is reasonably sm

You can always build your own with a distro build system like OpenEmbedded, if you want to have ultimate control. But a minbase Debian install is reasonably small by today's standards. Doing this using the Debian installer is not as easy as doing it using a tool like debos if you're trying to build a disk image or file system tarball to make a container (then you don't need the kernel). A Debian bookworm minbase container (no kernel or locales, with ca-certificates, does have systemd) works out to about 71MB gzip compressed or 212MB uncompressed (about 78MB compressed and 235MB uncompressed if you add 1 locale). That's definitely not small but it is *reasonably* small in my book today.