>In spite of needing something like this a few weeks ago, I wonder what the role of such reduced distributions actually are these days. I think this is pretty

>In spite of needing something like this a few weeks ago, I wonder what the role of such reduced distributions actually are these days. I think this is pretty much why. If you were to take your average hacker/maker, most of them would probably have a similar sentiment. However, most of them would also have a story about how they needed some tiny distro like TCL recently for some niche use case. I myself needed a tiny distro recently. I had 22 rackmount servers with no HDD all on the same network, and I needed them to all run the same static binary. I realized like most Intel servers, with default settings, they will try to boot over the network with PXE. Wanting to not spend a day messing around with provisioning these servers, I decided I would just put a linux image on a USB stick, stick it in my OpenWRT router, and host it over TFTP. Serving a large image from a USB stick every time each of 22 servers started up was an unnecessary use of bandwidth and would often fail (I didn't have the best router). I also didn't need anything except a network stack and the ability to run a 64 bit static binary, so I did some research and ended up using the x86_64 version of TCL. Worked great! I'm sure tons of others have weird niche use cases for such a distro. Of course, as my needs evolved, I ended up just using a minimal Arch linux image...