What are the best alternatives to Bitnami’s minideb?

Using official Debian images is the best way to go. Relying on third-party base images can lead to issues like what you're facing now. It might be worth sticking to trusted sources that's how you avoid the mess you find yourself in.

You could try using debian-slim. It's a great option! However, if you're looking for an exact drop-in replacement for minideb, it might require you to update your existing images to fit.

We've started using Echo for base images, which are Debian-based and focused on being free of vulnerabilities. They've been great for us so far!

If you’re in the same boat as us with the Helm charts, our plan is just to re-tag them in our private registry for now. You might also want to consider Alpine or even forking the minideb repo to maintain it yourself, as it seems manageable.

Even the figures show the benefits: minideb:bookworm is 38 MB while debian:bookworm-slim is just 27 MB. If you're concerned about space, remember that slightly larger images don’t really affect start-up times—it's more about reusing layers and making the most of what you have.