Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop

A lot of the SD-card wear issues come from people running “normal PC workflows” on a storage medium that was never designed for that pattern.

Something I’ve seen help many newcomers is simply enabling an overlay filesystem or tmpfs-based writes. It’s basically the middle ground between a full RAM-boot distro (piCore, Alpine diskless, NetBSD) and a standard SD-based Raspberry Pi OS.

You still get the normal ecosystem and docs, but almost no writes hit the card unless you explicitly commit them.

For anyone stuck between “I want something simple” and “I don’t want my SD to die,” overlays are the easiest win.

NetBSD and Tiny Core Linux, even with all their benefits, is a harder experience to get into if you haven't already dipped your toes into Linux, and doesn't have the same wide community and boundless online resources.

The point I'm making is that putting the rootfs on a memory filesystem, e.g., tmpfs, mfs, etc. avoids the problem with SD cards^1

This can be done with a variety of operating systems. IMO, the advantange of the RPi hardware is that it is supported by so many different operating systems

When I want to run additional, larger programs that are not in the rootfs I have embedded into the kernel, I either (a) run them from external storage or (b) copy them to the mfs/tmpfs

It depends on how much RAM I have available

1. There are probably other ways to avoid the problem, too

But, NetBSD ISOs are much heavier than TCL ISOs, and so while I'm sure there's a way to get just what I want working in diskless mode, I'm not confident I will have any RAM to run what I actually want to run on top of it.

As compared to TC, the "out of the box" NetBSD images contain many things I wouldn't need, so customizing it has been a recurring thought, but oh well. The documentation and careful modularity is, obviously, a huge bonus of NetBSD in that regard (even an end-user like me could do some interesting modifications of the kernel solely by reading the manual). TC seems much more ad-hoc, but I assume this, too, is intentional, by design.

Though I don't explicitly load the entire userspace into RAM, since this is a laptop and I don't foresee a need to remove the SSD after boot.

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.

I carefully put a fairly minimal Xfce setup on it instead of LXDE and RAM usage doubled. It's impressively hand crafted and pruned.

Sadly, though, it hasn't been updated since Debian 11.

In my experience, by the time you’re compiling and running code and installing dev dependencies on the remote machine, the size of the base OS isn’t a concern. I gained nothing from using smaller distros but lost a lot of time dealing with little issues and incompatibilities.

This won’t win me any hacker points, but now if I need a remote graphical Linux VM I go straight for the latest Ubuntu and call it day. Then I can get to work on my code and not chasing my tail with all of the little quirks that appear from using less popular distros.

The small distros have their place for specific use cases, especially automation, testing, or other things that need to scale. For one-offs where you’re already going to be installing a lot of other things and doing resource intensive work, it’s a safer bet to go with a popular full-size distro so you can focus on what matters.

Never really got what it’s for.

It'd be best with hardwired network though.

I used both the FLTK desktop (including my all-time favorite web browser, Dillo, which was fine for most sites up to about 2018 or so) and the text-only mode. TC repos are not bad at all, but building your own TC/squashfs packages will probably become second nature over time.

I can also confirm that a handful of lenghty, long-form radio programs (a somewhat "landmark" show) for my Tiny Country's public broadcasting are produced -- and, in some cases, even recorded -- on either a Dell Mini 9 or a Thinkpad T42 and Tiny Core Linux, using the (now obsolete?) Non DAW or Reaper via Wine. It was always fun to think about this: here I am, producing/recording audio for Public Broadcasting on a 13+ year old T42 or a 10 year old Dell Mini netbook bought for 20€ and 5€ (!) respectively, whereas other folks accomplish the exact same thing with a 2000€ MacBook Pro.

It's a nice distro for weirdos and fringe "because I can" people, I guess. Well thought out. Not very far from "a Linux that fits inside a single person's head". Full respect to the devs for their quiet consistency - no "revolutionary" updates or paradigm shifts, just keeping the system working, year after year. (FLTK in 2025? Why not? It does have its charm!) This looks to be quite similar to the maintenance philosophy of the BSDs. And, next to TC, even NetBSD feels "bloated" :) -- even though it would obviously be nice to have BSD Handbook level documentation for TC; then again, the scope/goal of the two projects is maybe too different, so no big deal. The Corebook [1] is still a good overview of the system -- no idea how up-to-date it is, though.

All in all, an interesting distro that may "grow on you".

1: http://www.tinycorelinux.net/book.html

Booting a dedicated, tiny OS with no distractions helped me focus. Plus since the home directory was a FAT32 partition, I could access all my files on any machine without having to boot. A feature I used a lot when printing assignments at the library.

Before encryption by default, get files from windows for family when they messed up their computers. Or change the passwords.

Before browser profiles and containers I used them in VMs for different things like banning, shopping, etc.

Down to your imagination really.

Not too mention just to play around with them too.

In 1985, and with 512K of RAM. It was very usable for work.

True. And it's still around. It's FOSS now, runs natively on a Raspberry Pi 1-400 and Zero, and has Wifi, IPv6, and a Webkit browser.

https://www.riscosopen.org/content/

https://www.riscosdev.com/direct/

No ssl, probably so you can access that site on the browser

If you were someone special, you got 1024x768.

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

They were expensive too. You had to pay for each device driver you used.

« QNX DEMO disk

Extending possibilities and adding undocumented features »

http://qnx.puslapiai.lt/qnxdemo/qnx_demo_disk.htm

EDIT: nevermind, I see that it has the md5 in a text file here: http://www.tinycorelinux.net/16.x/x86/release/

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.

https://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,26713.0.html

I recommend asking on that forum. Folks are helpful.

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.

I thought that would be immediately clear to the HN crowd but I might have overestimated your aesthetic senses.

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.