Those are impressive but it's not really a fair comparison, 256 byte intros are typically DOS executables which only require a handful of bytes worth of boilerp

Those are impressive but it's not really a fair comparison, 256 byte intros are typically DOS executables which only require a handful of bytes worth of boilerplate before you're putting pixels on the screen. The OP is working with Linux executables, which have a much higher fixed overhead to get running nevermind display any graphics, and that's reflected in the smallest category for Linux and Windows intros being 4096 bytes.