Rui CarmoTalos Linux is a minimal Linux distribution designed specifically for running Kubernetes clusters and that I have taken an interest in since it seems to do all the right things (at least the way I see it).
It has an impressive amount of features that make it particularly well suited for hand-off deployments, such as immutable infrastructure, API-driven configuration, and a strong focus on security, and has most of the hardware support I need to access GPU resources, integrate with Cloudflare or Tailscale, and run on both physical and virtualized environments.