You can run an entire, productive modern Linux, (minus a modern browser*) on 128MB of RAM and one slow core. If you push lower, you start running into issues. I would recommend having around 200MB or so of swap for sudden spikes of memory usage. An aggressive userspace OOM killer may make life easier.

On Linux, if you just run SDDM that launches xfce, you will quickly OOM the system, because SDDM will stay in memory. The same goes for most desktop managers. So the real way is to just `startx` your desktop environment directly and use console login.

i3 is the best call for usability/a modern feeling, with extremely low memory usage. The reasoning is that, if you're used to sway or i3, this will feel like home, and it has all the features you need to be productive. Anything else will eat more RAM, from what I've tried. It also feels really fast, even if your GPU is struggling, because there are no animations and very little movement.

I would personally recommend Alpine, as it really comes with nothing extra. You can then install a desktop environment manually (or use their setup-desktop script if you have plenty of RAM and storage). TinyCore is a bit too wild to do modern computing on; the paradigms are just too outdated, the installation is a bit of a pain, and the installer would OOM on the same system where I can run my entire i3 alpine setup.

DSL seems cool, I haven't tried it; I just wanted to share my experience.

You can try all of this by setting up a qemu VM. Be aware that you will need more RAM just for the BIOS, so maybe if you configure 210MB, youll end up with around 128 usable, or so. Your OS will report how much is usable, accurately.

You can then set CPU cores with usage limits, limit HDD speeds to 2000's HDD speeds (so that your swap isnt fast), and so on. Its a fun exercise to try to develop software on such a limited machine, and its fun to see which software launches and which doesn't.

*: the browser is an issue. Firefox is the preferrable option, but wouldn't launch on so little RAM. NetSurf or elinks/lynx etc. is the way to go, but websites that rely on JS to work, like any and all Rust documentation sites, will be completely unusable.

I recently used it to boot a ~1996 Compaq Presario from CD-Rom to image the hard-drive to a USB stick before wiping it for my retro-computer fun :)

It's kind of sad to hear "adult" people claim in all seriousness that it's reasonable that a kernel alone spends more memory than the minimum requirement for running Windows 95, the operating system with kernel, drivers, a graphical user interface and even a few graphical user-space applications.

Back in the early 00's I used DSL in university as it has an x86 emulator included. I could plug the USB in and run Linux under Windows. Kept that on a "huge" 512MB thumb drive that cost over $100. Still have that drive and it still works.

Every time I looked at DSL, I never understood the need to include 4 Web Browsers in a distro that supposedly prides itself on size.

Popular in 2024 (399 points, 179 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39215846

Took me a moment to understand what "DSL" relates to in this context. I thought of "dynamic scripting language" at first and was confused. But here it just means "Damn Small Linux".

Why is there so many spammy junk ads on this site? :|

The problem with old computers isn’t that they’re slow but fail randomly so they don’t need “smaller” Linux, they need more resiliency that can work with random RAM erros, corrupt disks, absurd CPU instruction failures.

The size was a 90s problem.

Distros like these help troubleshoot boxes that are old/slow but also not used as computers in the traditional sense. For example network boxes, NAS, video recording boxes etc that can't run the latest LTS ubuntu well but can boot a distro like DSL. getting a vga out on these things with a fast to boot distro helps you fix things like corrupt drives, bad partitioning, bad boot loaders etc which needs a few terminal commands and a distro that boots up quickly.

It once took ubuntu 18.04 30 minutes to boot on an old dual core intel network box once. I switched to Xubuntu and it was about 5 minutes. imagine having to do multiple reboots.

A great reason to try and support small distros is that older computers can still be used as long as they work.

There are also some charities that ship old PCs to Africa, install a small Linux distro on them, e.g.:

https://www.computers4charity.org/computers-for-africa

https://worldcomputerexchange.org/

Damn Small Linux was one of the first distros I tried out as teenager with a LiveCD. It's sad it fell out due to his lead being rather an asshole with his contributors and overall incompetent.

BTW, one of former core contributors went to make their own distro called TinyCoreLinux.

Here's a cool story of someone using a mini Linux (not DSL) to save a company-wide bug at a fast food chain.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100520020401/http://therealedw...

How does this compare to Alpine Linux, Amazon Linux and Slackware, including zipslack? Tiny Core Linux?

Seems to have been HN'd. Might be a bit too small to handle the traffic.