I've been frustrated dealing with other Vagrant boxes that come pre-loaded with a bunch of cruft - old versions of Puppet, Chef, Ansible, and other software that just plain ships broken. To address that, I've created some Minimal Vagrant boxes at https://atlas.hashicorp.com/minimal/ 64-bit base installs of CentOS, Ubuntu, and Debian that have very little installed beyond what the base system needs. I threw on Git, Vim, and sshd just because those happen to be fairly key pieces of my personal toolchain, as well as some additional software needed to comply with Vagrant's Base Box Creation Guide (lots of stuff is needed to install and run the VirtualBox tools, for instance). I was pleasantly surprised to find that not only do the 'minimized' installs use significantly less disk space (particularly the Debian-based ones), but they also use less RAM. Feel free to check them out. I am particularly interested in ways I can make the images even more streamlined, so if others have any ideas along those lines I'd love to hear them!
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Show HN: Minimal Vagrant base-box images for various Linuxen | Heykuki News