Bunsenlabs

I like to use Bunsenlabs as a base VM or container image.

It's based on Debian, is developed by former Crunchbang devs, and is very lean. It has backports support for hardcore developers and requires less than 2GB RAM for a decent LAMP stack, though I tend to use it to build Hashistacks with Terraform, Nomad, Consul and Vault to deploy to hybrid environments.

I use Packer and Vagrant to build and chain-build images since Packer can build Vagrant boxes, Docker Images (which are just tarballs) and virtual machines in addition to allowing for virtual machine imaging in the cloud.

https://www.bunsenlabs.org/installation.html