Photon OS

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.