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Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop
- bflesch 11mo agoLooks really nice, I like the idea. But can they please empower a user interface designer to simply improve the margins and paddings of their interface? With a bunch of small improvements it would look significantly better. Just fix the spacing between buttons and borders and other UI elements.
- grim_io 11mo agoOne could argue that visible borders are a feature, not a bug. If you are trying to maximize for accessibility, that is.
- egormakarov 11mo agoPretty sure it was not about presence of visible borders, but about missing spacing between borders and buttons. That on some screenshots, but not others. It's not like this ui has some high-density philosophy, it's just very inconsistent
- bflesch 11mo agoIt's not about the damn borders it is about the spacing between the buttons and other UI elements as you can see in the screenshot. I don't want them to introduce some shitty modern design, just fix the spacing so it doesn't immediately jump out as odd and unpolished.
- wild_egg 11mo agoModern UX trends are a scourge of excessive whitespace and low information density that get in the way of actually accomplishing tasks. Any project that rejects those trends gets bonus points in my book.
- crackernews1 11mo ago[dead]
- Perz1val 11mo agoLook at screenshots -> wallpaper window. The spacing between elements is all over the place and it simply looks like shit. Seeing this I'm having doubts if the team who did this is competent at all
- bflesch 11mo agoExactly. I know that not everybody spent 10 years fiddling with CSS so I can understand why a project might have a skill gap with regards to aesthetics. I'm not trying to judge their overall competence, just wanted to say that there are so many quick wins in the design it hurts me a bit to see it. And due to nature of open source projects I was talking about "empowering" a designer to improve it because oftentimes you submit a PR for aesthetic improvements and then notice that the project leaders don't care about these things, which is sad.
- ohhellnawman 11mo ago[dead]
- bflesch 11mo agoIf you look at the screenshots it immediately jumps out that it is unpolished: the spacings are all over the place, the window maximize/minimize/close buttons have different widths and weird margins. I thought that would be immediately clear to the HN crowd but I might have overestimated your aesthetic senses.
- delfinom 11mo agoThere is a balance. Too much information density is also disorienting, if not stressing. The biggest problem is finding that balance between multiple kinds of users and even individuals.
- linguae 11mo agoI sympathize, but I feel compelled to point out that the parent didn’t say that the interface had to look like a contemporary desktop. In my opinion, I believe the Tiny Core Linux GUI could use some more refinement. It seems inspired by 90s interfaces, but when compared to the interfaces of the classic Mac OS, Windows 95, OS/2 Warp, and BeOS, there’s more work to be done regarding the fit-and-finish of the UI, judging by the screenshots. To be fair, I assume this is a hobbyist open source project where the contributors spend time as they see fit. I don’t want to be too harsh. Fit-and-finish is challenging; not even Steve Jobs-era Apple with all of its resources got Aqua right the first time when it unveiled the Mac OS X Public Beta in 2000. Massive changes were made between the beta and Mac OS X 10.0, and Aqua kept getting refined with each successive version, with the most refined version, in my opinion, being Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, nearly five years after the public beta.
- throwaway984393 11mo ago[dead]
- pbhjpbhj 11mo agoThis just looks like a standard _old_ *nix project. I've used Tiny, a couple of decades ago IIRC, from a magazine cover CD. I imagine the sign-off date of 2008, the lack of very simple to apply mobile css, and no https to secure the downloads (if it had it then it would probably be SSL). This speaks to me of a project that's 'good enough', or abandoned, for/by those who made it. Left out to pasture as 'community dev submissions accepted'. I've not bothered to look, but wouldn't surprise me if the UI is hardcoded in assembly and a complete ballache to try and change.
- shiftpgdn 11mo agoThis is cool. My first into to a practical application of Linux in the early 2000s was using Damn Small Linux to recover files off of cooked Windows Machines. I looked up the project the other day while reminiscing and thought it would be interesting if someone took a real shot at reviving the spirit of the project.
- jollyjerry 11mo agoI used to have a floppy and a mini-cd boot version of these. The mini-cd looks like a credit card and fit into a standard size cd drive. Reading the history of the project is a bit of a bummer, but still love the project ethos.
- tombert 11mo agoDamn Small Linux was the second Linux I tried (after the free CD promotion that Ubuntu did). I liked it and it was fun to play with, but I was such a newbie that I wasn't able to really use it for anything. It's 20 years later and I've been running Linux for most of that time, so I probably would have even more fun revisiting DSL and Tiny Core Linux.
- lproven 11mo ago> someone took a real shot at reviving the spirit of the project. They did. https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/14/damn_small_linux_returns/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/14/damn_small_linux_retu...
- hypeatei 11mo agoThe site doesn't have HTTPS and there doesn't seem to be any mention of signatures on the downloads page. Any way to check it hasn't been MITM'd?
- firesteelrain 11mo agoNot foolproof. Could compute MD5 or SHA256 after downloading.
- hypeatei 11mo agoAnd compare it against what? EDIT: nevermind, I see that it has the md5 in a text file here: http://www.tinycorelinux.net/16.x/x86/release/ http://www.tinycorelinux.net/16.x/x86/release/
- maccard 11mo agoWhich is served from the same insecure domain. If the download is compromised you should assume the hash from here is too.
- hypeatei 11mo agoAn integrity check is better than nothing, but yes it says nothing about its authenticity.
- embedding-shape 11mo agoAn integrity check where both what you're checking and the hash you're checking against is literally not better than nothing if you're trying to prevent downloading compromised software. It'd flag corrupted downloads at least, so that's cool, but for security purposes the hash for a artifact has to be served OOB.
- uecker 11mo ago
- trollbridge 11mo agoNot to disrespect this, but it used to be entirely normal to have a GUI environment on a machine with 2MB of RAM and a 40MB disk. Or 128K of ram and 400 kb disk for that matter.
- Perz1val 11mo agoYea, but those platforms were not 64bit
- monocasa 11mo ago64 bit generally adds about 20% to the size of the executables and programs as t to last on x86, so it's not that big of a change.
- IAmLiterallyAB 11mo agoSwitch to an ILP32 ABI and you get a lot of that space back
- maccard 11mo agoA single 1920x1080 framebuffer (which is a low resolution monitor in 2025 IMO) is 2MB. Add any compositing into the mix for multi window displays and it literally doesn’t fit in memory.
- echoangle 11mo agoDo you really need the framebuffer in RAM? Wouldn't that be entirely in the GPU RAM?
- jerrythegerbil 11mo agoTo put it in GPU RAM, you need GPU drivers. For example, NVIDIA GPU drivers are typically around 800M-1.5G. That math actually goes wildly in the opposite direction for an optimization argument.
- deadbabe 11mo ago[flagged]
- lp0_on_fire 11mo agoWhy use a terminal when you can use punch cards?
- Y_Y 11mo agoBecause this is now a paperless office, please consider the enviroment
- adrianN 11mo agoSwitching away from clay tablets was a step in the wrong direction.
- ohhellnawman 11mo ago[dead]
- SV_BubbleTime 11mo agoThose clay tablets needed to be fired and had a negative carbon footprint. Handmade parchment, or leather carvings if you don’t mind.
- wizzwizz4 11mo agoThose both require cattle farming, which is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions (at least 10%, perhaps as high as 19.6%, per https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-agriculture-environment/livestock-dont-contribute-14-5-of-global-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-agriculture-environm...). Stick with papyrus or wax, please.
- adrianN 11mo agoWhy fire them when you can just reuse them?
- veganjay 11mo agoI have an older laptop with a 32-bit processor and found that TinyCoreLinux runs well on it. It has its own package manager that was easy to learn. This distro can be handy in these niche situations.
- bdbdbdb 11mo agoSimilar situation here. Have some old 32bit machines that I'm turning into writer decks. Most Linux distros have left 32bit behind so you can't just use Debian or Ubuntu and a lot of distros that aim to run on lower hardware are Ubuntu derivatives
- Narishma 11mo agoSame situation but I'm using NetBSD instead. I'm betting it'll still be supporting 32-bit x86 long after the linux kernel drops it.
- jacquesm 11mo agoPersonally, I think that dropping 32 bit support for Linux is a mistake. There is a vast number of people in developing countries on 32 bit platforms as well as many low cost embedded platforms and this move feels more than a little insensitive.
- stOneskull 11mo agowon't there still be the older kernels?
- ifh-hn 11mo agoI've used many of these small Linux distros. I used to have Tiny Core in a VM for different things. I also like SliTaz: http://slitaz.org/en http://slitaz.org/en, and Slax too: https://www.slax.org/ https://www.slax.org/ Oh and puppy Linux, which I could never get into but was good for live CDs: https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/ https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/ And there's also Alpine too.
- samtheprogram 11mo agoWow, Slax is still around and supports Debian now too? Thanks for sharing.
- projektfu 11mo agoI used to use it during the netbook era, was great for that.
- hdb2 11mo ago> I also like SliTaz thank you for this reminder! I had completely forgotten about SliTaz, looks like I need to check it out again!
- dayeye2006 11mo agowondering what's your typical usage for those small distros?
- jbstack 11mo agoThey can be nice for running low footprint VMs (e.g. in LXD / Incus) where you don't want to use a container. Alpine in particular is popular for this. The downside is there are sometimes compatibility issues where packages expect certain dependencies that Alpine doesn't provide.
- nopakos 11mo agoI use one of them to make an old EEE laptop a dedicated Pico-8 machine for my kids. [https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php]
- rcarmo 11mo agoThis would be perfect if it had an old Mac OS 7 Platinum-like look and window shading.
- gardnr 11mo agoI love lightweight distros. QNX had a "free as in beer" distro that fit on a floppy, with Xwindows and modem drivers. After years of wrangling with Slackware CDs, it was pretty wild to boot into a fully functional system from a floppy.
- anyfoo 11mo agoThat famous QNX boot disk was the first thing I thought of when reading the title as well.
- taylodl 11mo agoMe too! And the GUI was only a 40KB distribution and was waaaaaay better than Windows 3.0!
- jacquesm 11mo agoAnd incredibly responsive compared to the operatings systems of even today. Imagine that: 30 years of progress to end up behind where we were. Human input should always run at the highest priority in the system, not the lowest.
- M95D 11mo agoThat ended with Win9x. It was the last OS where the mouse and keyboard inputs were processed as hardware interrupts.
- ddalex 11mo agoI never understood how that QNX desktop didn't pick up instanntly, it was amazing !
- Joel_Mckay 11mo agoLicensing, and QNX missed a consumer launch window by around 17 years. Some businesses stick with markets they know, as non-retail customer revenue is less volatile. If you enter the consumer markets, there are always 30k irrational competitors (likely with 1000X the capital) that will go bankrupt trying to undercut the market. It is a decision all CEO must make eventually. Best of luck =3 "The Rules for Rulers: How All Leaders Stay in Power" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
- theanonymousone 11mo agoDoes it run docker?
- oso2k 11mo agoWith some modifications, yes. Boot2docker and boot2podman were based on tinycorelinux.
- thway15269037 11mo agoBoth are deprecated though. And both say something unexpected on their repositories: one suggests you to use Docker Desktop (what?!), the other to try Fedora (what?!!). Am I taking crazy pills?
- haunter 11mo agoAnother small one is the xwoaf (X Windows On A Floppy) rebuild project 4.0 https://web.archive.org/web/20240901115514/https://pupngo.dk/xwinflpy/xwoaf_rebuild.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240901115514/https://pupngo.dk... Showcase video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8or3ehc5YDo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8or3ehc5YDo iso https://web.archive.org/web/20240901115514/https://pupngo.dk/xwinflpy/xwoaf_rebuild4.iso https://web.archive.org/web/20240901115514/https://pupngo.dk... 2.1mb, 2.2.26 kernel >The forth version of xwoaf-rebuild is containing a lot of applications contained in only two binaries: busybox and mcb_xawplus. You get xcalc, xcalendar, xfilemanager, xminesweep, chimera, xed, xsetroot, xcmd, xinit, menu, jwm, desklaunch, rxvt, xtet42, torsmo, djpeg, xban2, text2pdf, Xvesa, xsnap, xmessage, xvl, xtmix, pupslock, xautolock and minimp3 via mcb_xawplus. And you get ash, basename, bunzip2, busybox, bzcat, cat, chgrp, chmod, chown, chroot, clear, cp, cut, date, dd, df, dirname, dmesg, du, echo, env, extlinux, false, fdisk, fgrep, find, free, getty, grep, gunzip, gzip, halt, head, hostname, id, ifconfig, init, insmod, kill, killall, klogd, ln, loadkmap, logger, login, losetup, ls, lsmod, lzmacat, mesg, mkdir, mke2fs, mkfs.ext2, mkfs.ext3, mknod, mkswap, mount, mv, nslookup, openvt, passwd, ping, poweroff, pr, ps, pwd, readlink, reboot, reset, rm, rmdir, rmmod, route, sed, sh, sleep, sort, swapoff, swapon, sync, syslogd, tail, tar, test, top, touch, tr, true, tty, udhcpc, umount, uname, uncompress, unlzma, unzip, uptime, wc, which, whoami, yes, zcat via busybox. On top you get extensive help system, install scripts, mount scripts, configure scripts etc.
- noufalibrahim 11mo agoIn around 2002, I got my hands on an old 386 which I was planning to use for teaching myself things. I was able to breathe life into it using MicroLinux. Two superformatted 1.44" floppy disks and the thing booted. Basic kernel, 16 colour X display, C compiler and Editor. I don't know if there are any other options for older machines other than stripped down Linux distros.
- Romario77 11mo agoI mean - DOS or it's equivalents still exist and for older computers you will probably be able to find drivers.
- dpflug 11mo agohttps://freedos.org/ https://freedos.org/
- anthk 11mo agoDelicate Linux; but you need patience to compile some LibreSSL fork on top of BrSSL and then recompile Lynx, a newer Dillo, Git and so on.
- UncleSlacky 11mo agoHaiku OS: https://www.haiku-os.org/ https://www.haiku-os.org/
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- oso2k 11mo agoI love Tiny Core Linux for use cases where I need fast boot times or have few resources. Testing old PCs, Pi Zero and Pi Zero 2W are great use cases.
- jacquesm 11mo agoThank you for that comment, I did not realize Pi Zero and Pi Zero 2W worked with TCL. I am brewing an application for that environment right now so this may just save the day and make my life a lot easier. Have you tried video support for the Pi specific cams under TCL?
- oso2k 11mo agoI don't know about CSI cameras. My use case for TCL doesn't require a CSI camera. But it looks like others have made a CSI camera work: https://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,26713.0.html https://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,26713.0.html I recommend asking on that forum. Folks are helpful.
- jacquesm 11mo agoThank you once more!
- anthk 11mo agohttps://luxferre.top https://luxferre.top http://t3x.org http://t3x.org All of the minilaguages exposed there will run on TC even with 32MB of RAM. On TC, set IceWM the default WM with no opaque moving/resizing as default and get rid of that horrible dock.
- devsda 11mo agoI've used it around early 2010s as a live cd to fix partitions etc. Definitely recommend as a lightweight distro. Was a little tricky to install on disk and even on disk it behaved mostly like a live cd and file changes had to be committed to disk IIRC. Hope they improved the experience now.
- nine_k 11mo ago/* On the website, body { font-size: 70%; } — why? To drive home the idea that it's tiny? The default font size is normally set to the value comfortable for the user, would be great to respect it. */
- arschficknigger 11mo ago[flagged]
- mannycalavera42 11mo agofor a moment I thought about a Corel Linux revamp :)
- lproven 11mo agoI wish. I would much prefer its final desktop, from Xandros 4, to the Trinity (TDE) desktop fork of KDE 3.
- roscas 11mo agoIt is so tiny that it is http only because https was too big...
- snvzz 11mo agoFor unknown reasons, tinycorelinux's website is geoblocked in Japan.
- hexagonwin 11mo agoI seem to be able to access it just fine via ProtonVPN's Japan region tho.
- snvzz 11mo agoI was also able to load it from Japan for the first time. In weeks before, when the topic came up elsewhere, I had to use one of my tailscale exit nodes elsewhere. It wouldn't work from Japan. Not from home, not from office, not from phone network either.
- supportengineer 11mo agoThat’s even smaller than these! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootable_business_card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootable_business_card
- slim 11mo agoTiny Core also runs from ramdisk, uses a packaging systems based on tarballs mounted in a fusefs and can be installed on a dos formatted usb key. It also has a subdistro named dCore[1] which uses debian packages (which it unpacks and mounts in the fusefs) so you get access to the ~70K packages of debian. It's documentation is a free book : http://www.tinycorelinux.net/book.html http://www.tinycorelinux.net/book.html [1] https://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/doku.php?id=dcore:welcome https://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/doku.php?id=dcore:welcome
- girvo 11mo agoI used to run Puppy Linux and then TCL (and its predecessor DSL) on a super old Pentium 3 laptop with like 700mb of RAM or something. Made it actually usable!
- alfiedotwtf 11mo ago“Tiny” :) I remember booting Linux off a 1.44Mb floppy
- jethro_tell 11mo agoWhat gui were you running?
- alfiedotwtf 11mo agoAh. Yeah, no gui on that device, but I was running XFree86 on another tiny device. Maybe 8Mb though
- extraduder_ire 11mo agoLast time I ran a linux distro from a floppy disk (mid 2000s, novelty reasons), it was xfce.
- retube 11mo agoAs I updated my thinkpad to 32 GB of RAM this morning (£150) I remembered my £2k (corporate) thinkpad in 1999, running Windows 98, had 32 MB of RAM. And it ran full Office and Lotus notes just fine :)
- hiAndrewQuinn 11mo agoTiny Core Linux has a version for Raspberry Pis called piCore [0] that I wish more people would look at, because it loads itself entirely into RAM and does not touch the SD card at all after that until and unless you explicitly tell it to. Phenomenal for those low powered servers you just want to leave on and running some tiny batch of cronjobs [1] or something for months or years at a time without worrying too much about wear on the SD card itself rendering the whole installation moot. This is actually how I have powered the backend data collection and processing for [2], as I wrote about in [3]. The end result is a static site built in Hugo but I was careful to pick parts I could safely leave to wheedle on their own for a long time. [1]: https://til.andrew-quinn.me/posts/consider-the-cronslave/ https://til.andrew-quinn.me/posts/consider-the-cronslave/ [2]: https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/selkouutiset-archive/ https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/selkouutiset-archive/ [3]: https://til.andrew-quinn.me/posts/lessons-learned-from-2-years-of-operating-a-tiny-news-archive/ https://til.andrew-quinn.me/posts/lessons-learned-from-2-yea...
- lukan 11mo ago"Phenomenal for those low powered servers you just want to leave on and running some tiny batch of cronjobs [1] or something for months or years at a time without worrying too much about wear on the SD card itself rendering the whole installation moot." Yes, this is exactly what I want, except I need some simple node servers running, which is not so ultra light. Would you happen to know, if this still all works within the ram out of box, or does this require extra work?
- fsagx 11mo agoon a pi? You can run nodejs fine on a pi with "Raspberry Pi OS Lite". In the configs, look for "Overlay File System" and enable it on the boot partition and main partition. The pi will boot from the sd card and run entirely in ram. Be sure to run something to clear your logs occasionally or reboot once in a while or you'll run out of RAM. Still, get a quality sd card and power supply. You can get years out of a setup like this.
- hiAndrewQuinn 11mo ago
- sfarcolacul987 11mo agoand who is using this?
- accrual 11mo agoCould such a distro support my i486-DX4-100 system with 64MB of RAM? I've been looking for something other than Win95, NT4, and OpenBSD 6.8 to run on this box. :)
- Simplita 11mo agoTiny Core has always amazed me. The amount of functionality they fit into such a small footprint shows how far you can go when you optimize for simplicity.
- Grom_PE 11mo agoTiny Core Linux fits nicely on a FAT32 EFI boot partition as a rescue OS.
- ajot 11mo agoHey, this sounds interesting! Is there any tutorial out there on how to make it work?
- vid 11mo agoOK but I need a Linux with GUI that is less than 1.44MB so it works with my floppy disk.
- vid 11mo agoNot sure why I was downvoted. I legitimately need this for a demo.
- hit8run 11mo agoIs there a reason the site doesn't support HTTPS? For a distro offering ISO downloads, this seems like a meaningful security gap -> it makes MITM attacks trivial for anyone on the network path.
- zer0tonin 11mo agoWhen I was a teenager, tiny core saved me for a few months. My laptop had died and all I could use until I got a replacement was an old desktop computer we had around with 256MB of RAM. It was around the end of the windows 7 era, so even Xubuntu was struggling on such an old computer. Tiny Core ran surprisingly well and I could actually use it to browse the web and use IRC.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]