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Photon OS
Broadcom/VMware's minimal Linux host operating system purpose-built for running containers and virtual machine appliances efficiently.
Based on
Independent
First released
2015
Package manager
tdnf (.rpm)
Desktop environments
None (minimal, container/VM host)
Photon OS is engineered from the ground up as a lightweight container/VM host rather than a general-purpose OS: a small footprint, a fast boot time, and a kernel tuned specifically for VMware's hypervisor platforms (vSphere, among others). It uses tdnf ('tiny DNF'), a lighter reimplementation of the DNF package manager, and ships with Docker and Kubernetes tooling readily available, since running containers reliably is its core reason to exist. It's the default guest OS choice for many VMware appliance images and is commonly deployed as a minimal Kubernetes node OS in VMware-based infrastructure.
MirrorNest doesn't mirror distro ISOs — installation media should always come straight from the project's own official download page (linked above), so you get the correct checksum/signature to verify against.