Posted by LorenDB 12/6/2025
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.
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.
Any project that rejects those trends gets bonus points in my book.
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.
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.
If you are trying to maximize for accessibility, that is.
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.
I would much prefer its final desktop, from Xandros 4, to the Trinity (TDE) desktop fork of KDE 3.
I remember booting Linux off a 1.44Mb floppy