photon-os

Motivation Docker recently updated its terms making the Docker Desktop for macOS and Windows free only for personal use. Any business with more than 250 employees or more than $10 million annual revenue needs to buy its Docker Business subscription. For me, the Docker Desktop was already a hit and a miss. It was great when it worked but a pain to troubleshoot when it did not. Also, it does not bode well when they make software based on open source tools paid after it was free for a long time....

Photon OS is an open-source minimalist Linux operating system from VMware, highly optimized for container workloads. Crazy fast How optimized is it, you ask? The minimal image weighs in at a tiny 470MiB, installs in 20 seconds, uses less than 1GiB of disk space after install, boots in 10 seconds (including the GRUB wait time!), and consumes less than 150MiB RAM after boot. It cannot get better than that (maybe VMware surprises me in the next release!...