I think in the majority of cases it's just going to be simpler to use a minimal base image like debian. And the overhead is pretty minimal - once you've got the

I think in the majority of cases it's just going to be simpler to use a minimal base image like debian. And the overhead is pretty minimal - once you've got the base image, you only need to download the changes for other child images. Admittedly, you do incur the image overhead at least once per Docker host. In short - horses for courses ;)