Self-Hosted Alternatives to Popular Services

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The original was posted on /r/selfhosted by /u/agent_kater on 2025-02-01 20:30:47+00:00.

I hope this isn't off-topic here but I'm active in this community anyway and people here usually know about this stuff, so I wanted to give it a shot.

I'm looking for a small Linux distro without desktop environment for VMs, not containers. I just tried the "minimal" Debian ISO and selected nothing but the SSH server and it still used more than 2 GB! What I'm looking for should be more in the < 100 MB range. It should still have the ability to install common tools like curl, ifconfig, python, this kind of thing, from a package.

Alpine almost fits the bill, but the musl thing frequently causes issues when building for example Node.js libraries that use C code.