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title: What is Talos?
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---

Talos is a container optimized Linux distro; a reimagining of Linux for distributed systems such as Kubernetes.
Designed to be as minimal as possible while still maintaining practicality.
For these reasons, Talos has a number of features unique to it:

- it is immutable
- it is atomic
- it is ephemeral
- it is minimal
- it is secure by default
- it is managed via a single declarative configuration file and gRPC API

Talos can be deployed on container, cloud, virtualized, and bare metal platforms.

## Why Talos

In having less, Talos offers more.
Security.
Efficiency.
Resiliency.
Consistency.

All of these areas are improved simply by having less.