For those who are curious, Alpine was the recommended distro as I went through various reviews. I don't know how reliable that advice is.
I once tried to use it as a GUI daily driver on my work laptop (since I was already using it for containers and VMs at work) and found that stretched it a bit too far out of its speciality. It definitely had the necessary packages, just with a lot of rough edges and increased rate of problems (separate from glibc, systemd, or other expected compatibility angles). Plus the focus on having things be statically linked makes really wide (lots of packages) installs negated any space efficiency gains it had.