Of course you can choose a general purpose Linux dist. But you'll still have to go through the extra work of partitioning the disk, installing the system, selecting packages, possibly follow some other guide to install Docker Engine, Docker Compose, Docker Buildx, and doing that thing with the docker group. At that point you'll pretty much have what Lightwhale provides out of the box. Except you'll be left with a system that isn't immutable, and where system and data is entangled on one filesystem. And if that's your thing, you should do definitely that. But...
If you just want to run your containers, then Lightwhale is best in class.
Of course you can choose a general purpose Linux dist. But you'll still have to go through the extra work of partitioning the disk, installing the system, selecting packages, possibly follow some other guide to install Docker Engine, Docker Compose, Docker Buildx, and doing that thing with the docker group. At that point you'll pretty much have what Lightwhale provides out of the box. Except you'll be left with a system that isn't immutable, and where system and data is entangled on one filesystem. And if that's your thing, you should do definitely that. But...
If you just want to run your containers, then Lightwhale is best in class.