5 ms·

So this makes me wonder what the smallest modern OS is that’s usable for daily tasks (browsing, email, some light not taking). And also for more rigorous work t

So this makes me wonder what the smallest modern OS is that’s usable for daily tasks (browsing, email, some light not taking). And also for more rigorous work tasks (programming, video editing, sound editing). I’d be curious to see what can be done on-device. I bet there’s some cool stuff…time to google!

citrin_ru 5y ago
It's depend on what is considered usable for daily tasks. I don't think there is a modern OS as small as DOS which can run FireFox or Chromium, but NetBSD and OpenBSD have kernels smaller than FreeBSD and much smaller than Linux, but still can run most modern open-source software including browsers.
- tenebrisalietum 5y ago
  Menuet32/64 is pretty small, and I think it runs a Webkit browser.
- amatecha 5y ago
  Yeah, I've got OpenBSD installed on my iMac G4 from ~2002. Runs fine, quite well in fact (and is fully up to date with modern security features)! Now if I were to put an SSD in there, it would be even better! Hmmm... weekend project added to the list... ;)
genghizkhan 5y ago
If you're okay compiling your own kernel I'd wager you could get by on around 30 odd megabytes using the Alpine base image (5MB userland and the rest kernel), though it would not be sufficient to do any compilation on its own.
- exdsq 5y ago
  How much would 'build-essentials' add to that do you reckon?
papacho 5y ago
if by small you mean code size, Haiku can do all of that.
mmcgaha 5y ago
I spent a few hours playing with RISC OS on my pi 400, and it is a pretty complete system. The image download was less than 200MB.
handrous 5y ago
Any modern, major browser will bloat your install size & minimum system requirements (if you want to actually use the software you've got, that is). I recently used a very minimal install of Void on a machine that crushes what I had in, say, 2005, on a performance basis (2GB memory, dual-core Celeron clocked over 1Ghz, solid-state disk) and the whole system was slooooow and choppy even using mostly suckless software like dwm, including their Surf (webkit-based but otherwise as minimal as it gets) browser—if I opened even one "web app" or more than a couple lighter pages at once. If you remove the requirement for a modern Web experience, we used to fit pretty damn good GUI operating systems on single live-boot floppy disks (QNX had one of these, IIRC, and it was great—much better UI responsiveness under load than a Linux desktop, kinda like BeOS but even tinier)
- morpheos137 5y ago
  For my daily driver I run Openbsd 6.9 on a thinkpad from 2008 with a spinning disk drive. It runs lightning quick and I have a modern web browser (Firefox 88). Only thing that is non-stock is the ram size has been increased in capacity but I rarely use all of it (only if I have like 50+ browser tabs open) Just a guess but never counted it. I think the keys to a fast desktop experience is -stay away from linux. The kernel and most distros suffer from kitchensinkitis. -don't use a heavy window manager. I use a custom configuration of Motif (it works and does not get in the way). With quality software old tech is still more than competent today. I can watch HD youtube videos too if I want. Office suites and programs like inkscape work fine. This is a 2 core machine. If I need more compute power I can use the cloud.
  - handrous 5y ago
    > -stay away from linux. The kernel and most distros suffer from kitchensinkitis. > -don't use a heavy window manager. I use a custom configuration of Motif (it works and does not get in the way). Yeah, that's why I picked Void. It's only a little fatter than Alpine, but better-suited to desktop use. Agreed that Linux generally has never (in the 20ish years I've used it, anyway) felt high-performance, exactly, on a workstation, but Void keeps out the garbage services Linux has accumulated over the years, unless you install them yourself, so gets it to a point where it's only slightly fatter than circa 2000 Linux (kernel's grown larger, no getting around that). Used dwm because it's extremely light. Certainly Gnome wouldn't have worked, to pick the worst possible option (resource-use wise). Overall, Linux continues to feel like it does very poorly (in a workstation/desktop context, anyway) any time there's any contention for resources whatsoever, including just multiple things needing CPU cycles. Which is... kinda a shitty way to be, for a multitasking operating system. Maybe I'd have had better luck with a BSD, I dunno. It felt OK to use, though, as long as I avoided the Web. I think that machine's going back to being a Lakka box under my TV, but next time I'm on something relatively weak maybe I'll cycle through a couple of the BSDs to see if any of them work better for me.
VLM 5y ago
A chromebook. People don't do "on device" anymore outside of unusual situations.
ghaff 5y ago
Multimedia editing, especially video, is what kills you there. Not so much from an OS perspective. You can do a minimalist container Linux install but in terms of the resources you need on the system.
prox 5y ago
I would go for Pi as well. The Pi3 I have can do most daily tasks, I assume the 4 is even better, especially for video editing (blender perhaps?)
pavlov 5y ago
Mac OS 9 is probably the weirdest evolution of 1980s single-task computing into something you could still use as a daily driver. It was kept alive by two entirely disparate user groups: the iMac crowd who only used a browser (or the AOL client), and professional designer users who spent the entire day in Avid (or Pro Tools or After Effects or QuarkXPress or Photoshop).
- mattl 5y ago
  You'd be surprised how much you can get done with Mac OS 9 with Classzilla.
- classichasclass 5y ago
  Yes, but Mac OS 9 (and any MultiFinder version of the classic Mac OS) at least presented the illusion of multitasking. And it did multitask, as long as the apps cooperated and handed off to each other, and an extension didn't go bang or smash into another one, and ... But, jokes aside, I still got a lot of work done in Mac OS 9 back in the day, so it wasn't nearly that dire even if it was best not to peek under the hood.
deckard1 5y ago
QNX was almost this. I believe at one point you could even run Firefox or Chrome on it. > And also for more rigorous work tasks (programming, video editing, sound editing) Somewhat amusingly, an OS like DOS (or QNX) would probably be better at video/sound editing than any "modern" OS. It took a long time for Linux to be able to do audio processing or other real-time low latency things. Even today you may have to tweak things a bit[1] depending on your use case. A video editor that has complete control over your machine would absolutely scream. A lightweight DOS with support for newer hardware (USB, PCIe, etc.) with a thin Vulkan/OpenGL and networking stack would probably be ideal for these types of apps. [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Professional_audio https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Professional_audio
ashleyn 5y ago
Alpine Linux. Not just for Docker images. I run it text-only on some crap Dell Dimension in my basement workshop. 15-21 megabytes of memory used on a default install. Has networking, framebuffer, usb, and otherwise all the modern trimmings. Probably the closest you'll ever come to a modern DOS experience. Like one commenter above said, everything seems more proprietary now. The moment I realised we no longer live in an open standards world, was when I realised there was no text-mode Discord client, not even possible to make without getting banned from the service.

citrin_ru 5y ago

It's depend on what is considered usable for daily tasks. I don't think there is a modern OS as small as DOS which can run FireFox or Chromium, but NetBSD and OpenBSD have kernels smaller than FreeBSD and much smaller than Linux, but still can run most modern open-source software including browsers.

tenebrisalietum 5y ago
Menuet32/64 is pretty small, and I think it runs a Webkit browser.
amatecha 5y ago
Yeah, I've got OpenBSD installed on my iMac G4 from ~2002. Runs fine, quite well in fact (and is fully up to date with modern security features)! Now if I were to put an SSD in there, it would be even better! Hmmm... weekend project added to the list... ;)

genghizkhan 5y ago

If you're okay compiling your own kernel I'd wager you could get by on around 30 odd megabytes using the Alpine base image (5MB userland and the rest kernel), though it would not be sufficient to do any compilation on its own.

exdsq 5y ago
How much would 'build-essentials' add to that do you reckon?

papacho 5y ago

if by small you mean code size, Haiku can do all of that.

mmcgaha 5y ago

I spent a few hours playing with RISC OS on my pi 400, and it is a pretty complete system. The image download was less than 200MB.

handrous 5y ago

Any modern, major browser will bloat your install size & minimum system requirements (if you want to actually use the software you've got, that is). I recently used a very minimal install of Void on a machine that crushes what I had in, say, 2005, on a performance basis (2GB memory, dual-core Celeron clocked over 1Ghz, solid-state disk) and the whole system was slooooow and choppy even using mostly suckless software like dwm, including their Surf (webkit-based but otherwise as minimal as it gets) browser—if I opened even one "web app" or more than a couple lighter pages at once. If you remove the requirement for a modern Web experience, we used to fit pretty damn good GUI operating systems on single live-boot floppy disks (QNX had one of these, IIRC, and it was great—much better UI responsiveness under load than a Linux desktop, kinda like BeOS but even tinier)

morpheos137 5y ago
For my daily driver I run Openbsd 6.9 on a thinkpad from 2008 with a spinning disk drive. It runs lightning quick and I have a modern web browser (Firefox 88). Only thing that is non-stock is the ram size has been increased in capacity but I rarely use all of it (only if I have like 50+ browser tabs open) Just a guess but never counted it. I think the keys to a fast desktop experience is -stay away from linux. The kernel and most distros suffer from kitchensinkitis. -don't use a heavy window manager. I use a custom configuration of Motif (it works and does not get in the way). With quality software old tech is still more than competent today. I can watch HD youtube videos too if I want. Office suites and programs like inkscape work fine. This is a 2 core machine. If I need more compute power I can use the cloud.
- handrous 5y ago
  > -stay away from linux. The kernel and most distros suffer from kitchensinkitis. > -don't use a heavy window manager. I use a custom configuration of Motif (it works and does not get in the way). Yeah, that's why I picked Void. It's only a little fatter than Alpine, but better-suited to desktop use. Agreed that Linux generally has never (in the 20ish years I've used it, anyway) felt high-performance, exactly, on a workstation, but Void keeps out the garbage services Linux has accumulated over the years, unless you install them yourself, so gets it to a point where it's only slightly fatter than circa 2000 Linux (kernel's grown larger, no getting around that). Used dwm because it's extremely light. Certainly Gnome wouldn't have worked, to pick the worst possible option (resource-use wise). Overall, Linux continues to feel like it does very poorly (in a workstation/desktop context, anyway) any time there's any contention for resources whatsoever, including just multiple things needing CPU cycles. Which is... kinda a shitty way to be, for a multitasking operating system. Maybe I'd have had better luck with a BSD, I dunno. It felt OK to use, though, as long as I avoided the Web. I think that machine's going back to being a Lakka box under my TV, but next time I'm on something relatively weak maybe I'll cycle through a couple of the BSDs to see if any of them work better for me.

VLM 5y ago

A chromebook. People don't do "on device" anymore outside of unusual situations.

ghaff 5y ago

Multimedia editing, especially video, is what kills you there. Not so much from an OS perspective. You can do a minimalist container Linux install but in terms of the resources you need on the system.

prox 5y ago

I would go for Pi as well. The Pi3 I have can do most daily tasks, I assume the 4 is even better, especially for video editing (blender perhaps?)

pavlov 5y ago

Mac OS 9 is probably the weirdest evolution of 1980s single-task computing into something you could still use as a daily driver. It was kept alive by two entirely disparate user groups: the iMac crowd who only used a browser (or the AOL client), and professional designer users who spent the entire day in Avid (or Pro Tools or After Effects or QuarkXPress or Photoshop).

mattl 5y ago
You'd be surprised how much you can get done with Mac OS 9 with Classzilla.
classichasclass 5y ago
Yes, but Mac OS 9 (and any MultiFinder version of the classic Mac OS) at least presented the illusion of multitasking. And it did multitask, as long as the apps cooperated and handed off to each other, and an extension didn't go bang or smash into another one, and ... But, jokes aside, I still got a lot of work done in Mac OS 9 back in the day, so it wasn't nearly that dire even if it was best not to peek under the hood.

deckard1 5y ago

QNX was almost this. I believe at one point you could even run Firefox or Chrome on it. > And also for more rigorous work tasks (programming, video editing, sound editing) Somewhat amusingly, an OS like DOS (or QNX) would probably be better at video/sound editing than any "modern" OS. It took a long time for Linux to be able to do audio processing or other real-time low latency things. Even today you may have to tweak things a bit[1] depending on your use case. A video editor that has complete control over your machine would absolutely scream. A lightweight DOS with support for newer hardware (USB, PCIe, etc.) with a thin Vulkan/OpenGL and networking stack would probably be ideal for these types of apps. [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Professional_audio https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Professional_audio

ashleyn 5y ago

Alpine Linux. Not just for Docker images. I run it text-only on some crap Dell Dimension in my basement workshop. 15-21 megabytes of memory used on a default install. Has networking, framebuffer, usb, and otherwise all the modern trimmings. Probably the closest you'll ever come to a modern DOS experience. Like one commenter above said, everything seems more proprietary now. The moment I realised we no longer live in an open standards world, was when I realised there was no text-mode Discord client, not even possible to make without getting banned from the service.