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1. CrunkLord420 (crunklord420@rdrama.cc)'s status on Monday, 09-Jan-2023 09:05:09 JST CrunkLord420
   I wanted to figure out what was the best low RAM linux distro for what is now at this point retro-PC hardware.
   
   Damn Small Linux is dead, but the developer still works on Tiny Core Linux. It's an interesting distro. It uses only 25MB of RAM at GUI desktop+terminal. It has it's own in-house FLTK window manager and terminal. He's forked Xvesa and uses it instead of Xorg. Packages are downloaded to RAM or HDD, and then mounted into RAM as loop devices either at boot or "on demand". The issues are that this system of mounting packages eats up scarce RAM, and the package repository is like a crypt of decade old packages and scary from a security perspective. There's no reasonable browser, an 8 year old version of chromium, RAM devouring firefox-esr, you may as well use w3m if you suggest dillo or netsurf. Oh and I couldn't even get the distro to boot with 128MB, I had to bump it up to 256MB.
   
   Then I tried Alpine because it uses busybox and OpenRC. Using 55MB at console boot with udhcpc+syslog+cron+ntp+dropbear. Xorg+dbus+i3+urxvt bringing it up 74MB. Alpine solved the browser issue with Core because it had Falkon, a halfway decent browser using QtWebEngine that ran fine unlike Firefox.
   •  (mint@ryona.agency)'s status on Monday, 09-Jan-2023 09:05:09 JST 

     in reply to
     @crunklord420 I know it doesn't fit your criteria (1-2 gigs of RAM instead of megabytes), but I would still drop this link for posterity.
     https://notes.valdikss.org.ru/linux-for-old-pc-from-2007/en/
     In short: le9 kernel patch with agressive zram makes computer usage on older systems (not retro, but getting there with how much of resource hogs modern applications are) tolerable.
   • CrunkLord420 (crunklord420@rdrama.cc)'s status on Monday, 09-Jan-2023 09:17:50 JST CrunkLord420

     in reply to

     • COOL_FREE_RINGTONES
     • Ian Cho
     @iancho @s8n because does Falkon run on NetBSD? Does mpv run on NetBSD? Does NetBSD support any version of OpenGL on anything ever?
   • 🌲Number 1 Pleroma Criminal on XBL 🇵🇱|🇺🇸 (phenomx6@fedi.pawlicker.com)'s status on Monday, 09-Jan-2023 09:17:50 JST 🌲Number 1 Pleroma Criminal on XBL 🇵🇱|🇺🇸

     in reply to

     • COOL_FREE_RINGTONES
     • Ian Cho
     What GPU are you looking at using?
     
     MPV is on NetBSD, falkon is not (compiled that is).
     https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/multimedia/mpv/index.html
   • Ian Cho (iancho@chudbuds.lol)'s status on Monday, 09-Jan-2023 09:17:53 JST Ian Cho

     in reply to

     • COOL_FREE_RINGTONES
     Why not NetBSD?
   • CrunkLord420 (crunklord420@rdrama.cc)'s status on Monday, 09-Jan-2023 09:17:54 JST CrunkLord420

     in reply to

     • COOL_FREE_RINGTONES
     @s8n yeah but debian is gonna be bloat because it uses GNU utils instead of busybox.
   • CrunkLord420 (crunklord420@rdrama.cc)'s status on Monday, 09-Jan-2023 09:17:55 JST CrunkLord420

     in reply to

     • COOL_FREE_RINGTONES
     @s8n but then it doesn't fulfill the esoteric function of recycling old computers in the third world.
   • COOL_FREE_RINGTONES (s8n@posting.lolicon.rocks)'s status on Monday, 09-Jan-2023 09:17:55 JST COOL_FREE_RINGTONES

     in reply to
     @crunklord420 why not? You're still going to use the old computer. I used to have a custom debian installation I could install from a floppy disk to 486es
   • CrunkLord420 (crunklord420@rdrama.cc)'s status on Monday, 09-Jan-2023 09:17:56 JST CrunkLord420

     in reply to

     • COOL_FREE_RINGTONES
     @s8n can you compile everything yourself when you only have 128MB of RAM? hmmmm????? didn't think so.
   • COOL_FREE_RINGTONES (s8n@posting.lolicon.rocks)'s status on Monday, 09-Jan-2023 09:17:56 JST COOL_FREE_RINGTONES

     in reply to
     @crunklord420 you cross-compile it on a more powerful machine, my dude
   • COOL_FREE_RINGTONES (s8n@posting.lolicon.rocks)'s status on Monday, 09-Jan-2023 09:17:57 JST COOL_FREE_RINGTONES

     in reply to
     @crunklord420 if I wanted minimal ram usage I would just use a debian derivative (devuan) and compile my own kernel. I'd install the absolute minimum userspace with debootstrap then install whatever I wanted to run manually one package at a time
   • CrunkLord420 (crunklord420@rdrama.cc)'s status on Monday, 09-Jan-2023 09:46:49 JST CrunkLord420

     in reply to

     • 🌲Number 1 Pleroma Criminal on XBL 🇵🇱|🇺🇸
     • COOL_FREE_RINGTONES
     • Ian Cho
     @PhenomX6 @iancho @s8n I'm not but imagine a card appropriate for a computer with 256MB of RAM. NVIDIA has Linux drivers on their website for hardware dating back to the Riva 128.
   • 🌲Number 1 Pleroma Criminal on XBL 🇵🇱|🇺🇸 (phenomx6@fedi.pawlicker.com)'s status on Monday, 09-Jan-2023 09:46:49 JST 🌲Number 1 Pleroma Criminal on XBL 🇵🇱|🇺🇸

     in reply to

     • COOL_FREE_RINGTONES
     • Ian Cho
     Those also don't work on kernels remotely new.