lima-vm / lima-vm/lima

Debian-slim as Alpine alternative concerning disk footprint

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enhancement guest/debian
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Description

### Description

Since SSD space is often an issue on macs but Alpine uses a different c library, which can result in poor perforce when running a python (https://pythonspeed.com/articles/alpine-docker-python/).

Therefore, I would recommend supporting Debian-slim as small alternative as template for a VM with less disk footprint. . With Debian-slim the footprint is ca. 82 MB + kernel resources, which is larger than Alpine but still okay. Maybe Ubuntu minimal is another option here, but Debian-slim is smaller.

Sadly, Debian-slim is not available as official image. [Debian cloud images](https://cloud.debian.org/images/cloud/) (qcow2) It is only available inside a container registry/repository as with Docker. For managing that there is actually a repository

https://github.com/debuerreotype/docker-debian-artifacts/blob/4648ad5c6feb1318b8a6c31502ebde8bb18ebb5e/bullseye/slim/

Of course I could use that as containers inside a VM that has containerd + nerdctl, but often for development purposes three or four different small VMs (one with python, one with node, etc.) is all that is needed for different projects, which are only running when I'm actually working on them. Even with 4 Debian-slim VMs in lima it would be way less disk space than having a full flavored Ubuntu-VM with 4 containers in it ( > 900MB), let alone running an additional layer of abstraction.
In that fashion I did this with multiple alpine VMs, but ran across those python performance issues.

Best

P.R.

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