When 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.

I'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.

/* 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. */

For unknown reasons, tinycorelinux's website is geoblocked in Japan.

That’s even smaller than these!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootable_business_card

Could 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. :)

Tiny 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.

I 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!

Another small one is the xwoaf (X Windows On A Floppy) rebuild project 4.0 https://web.archive.org/web/20240901115514/https://pupngo.dk...

Showcase video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8or3ehc5YDo

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.

I 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.