Comment by mlacks
13 hours ago
Reminds me of my first linux distro called damnsmall linux. I think this was used as a first attempt to port linux to the gamecube, but the main team driving the effort ended up going with Gentoo instead.
From the main page:
As with most things in the GNU/Linux community, this project continues to stand on the shoulders of giants. I am just one guy without a CS degree, so for now, this project is based on antiX 23 i386. AntiX is a fantastic distribution that I think shares much of the same spirit as the original DSL project. AntiX shares pedigree with MEPIS and also leans heavily on the geniuses at Debian. So, this project stands on the shoulders of giants. In other words, DSL 2024 is a humble little project!
Though it may seem comparably ridiculous that 700MB is small in 2024 when DSL was 50MB in 2002, I’ve done a lot of hunting to find small footprint applications, and I had to do some tricks to get a workable desktop into the 700MB limit. To get the size down the ISO currently reduced full language support for German, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese (de_DE, en_AU, en_GB, en_US, es_ES, fr_FR, es_ES, pt_PT, & pt_BR ). I had to strip the source codes, many man pages, and documentation out. I do provide a download script that will restore all the missing files, and so far, it seems to be working well.
I was just reacquainting myself with Puppy Linux, DSL, and TinyCoreLinux a couple weeks ago to sandbox an LLM agent in a VM. Good stuff.
For those who are curious, Alpine was the recommended distro as I went through various reviews. I don't know how reliable that advice is.
Alpine is great, especially for anything single purposed and headless (be it physical, VM, or container) so long as that thing isn't too tied to glibc. Been around a long time with a stable community (who are mostly using it for containers). It also defaults to a typical versioned release scheme but has the ability to switch to rolling just by changing the repo if you know you need the latest versions.
I once tried to use it as a GUI daily driver on my work laptop (since I was already using it for containers and VMs at work) and found that stretched it a bit too far out of its speciality. It definitely had the necessary packages, just with a lot of rough edges and increased rate of problems (separate from glibc, systemd, or other expected compatibility angles). Plus the focus on having things be statically linked makes really wide (lots of packages) installs negated any space efficiency gains it had.