At an previous employer i was able to cut down on the needed space by standartising the layers and adding a timelimit in which the tags were available. The base images were build after we rolled out updates of packages and "encouraged" everyone to use those for their containers. These containers were also minified as much as needed(deduplicated files, removing useless stuff, ...), without sacrificing usability. I also used buildah to combine everything into an single layer to prevent removed files from wasting space. Sadly DNF blows up the images so it was hard to minify it much.

Squashing the image means you end up duplicating all those files across images though, unless I'm misunderstanding.

I built a little site to visualize a problem I keep running into using Docker at customer sites with bad internet. It's solvable without moving completely off Docker. Would love to chat if anyone else runs into this and wants a drop-in solution.

What's your alternative here?

I mean...it works just fine without internet...host your own registry...or just build your own from Dockerfiles locally. Not saying it is the right use case for everything but I'm confused what you mean by docker doesn't work without the internet. Neither does pip, rubygems, apt, etc...unless you build locally or host your own repository. Can you elaborate on what exactly you mean because you probably have a point that I am just missing.

You can also docker save + docker load :)