Quoting lsore...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca:
I would be impressed by a Debian install in less than 250MB storage space. It would have to be rather minimal. Even running apt-get update to pull the list of available packages easily grabs 40MB disk space in my experience.
We're working on an embedded system, which I'm just upgrading to buster. It eats ~ 180..190 MiB. We dpkg-exclude /usr/share/doc/ and some more, which are not needed there. Also, we use not the official Debian archive with its > 53000 binary packages, but a local mirror with only 450 packages. Otherwise apt collapses once in a while with our 128 MiB RAM. It is still Debian armel, only it's reduced and we add our own dozen of packages. debianforembeddedsystems/rules :—)