[5e92cb50239222b]

You can build Debian up to anything you want. I prefer installing new systems from the netinstall image and skipping the mirror configuration step completely. This produces a very minimal system that has all the basics (bash, ssh client, vi, and coreutils), but without anything else. If you throw away apt caches, it weights around 500 MB (half of which are various kernel modules).

You then install the minimum amount of software necessary to cover the use case

  # apt install --no-install-{recommend,suggest}s xxx