Yes, I know so much of Alpine’s lightweightness comes from not using glibc.
But still, the other options I see are far from being slimmed down. Debian, Ubuntu server, CentOS… They all could use some cuts.
What’s the most slimmed down non-desktop distro that still has a glibc base? I honestly don’t care if it has its own package manager (build tool handles this for me). Just wanna use it in containers for running server apps.
I mean Arch is what you make of it. It can be as lightweight and minimal as you want it to be based on your installation decisions.
“Lightness” in what sense are you after?
Size of distribution? # of packages?
Otherwise you’ll be using basically the same kernel images.
Maybe you should be custom compiling your own Linux Kernel to be even more “lightweight”.