Later, I made an immutable "Swiss Army knife" USB stick distro called LilDeb, based on Debian Live. And literally carried it on a Swiss Army pocketknife on my keychain. LilDeb was implemented in two big shell scripts, which you can still see at: https://www.neilvandyke.org/lildeb/
It once took ubuntu 18.04 30 minutes to boot on an old dual core intel network box once. I switched to Xubuntu and it was about 5 minutes. imagine having to do multiple reboots.
It fits into under 700 MB and runs in well under 100 MB of RAM. The default Ubuntu image is about 6 GB now and takes a gig of RAM.
Have you not tried it? I have:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/14/damn_small_linux_retu...
Try Alpine. It's amazing.
Xubuntu 22.04 took nearly 10 GB of disk and half a gig of RAM. I measured it:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/18/ubuntu_remixes/
Alpine takes 1.1 GB of disk and under 200 MB of RAM.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/05/new_lts_kernel_and_al...
Both running a full Xfce $CURRENT desktop, in a Virtualbox VM.
BTW, one of former core contributors went to make their own distro called TinyCoreLinux.
Those were some… painful times.
DSL uses the Debian kernel, Glibc, and the GNU utils.
“TinyCore” is 23MB. It includes a minimal GUI desktop.
“CorePlus” at 243 MB is internationalized, has a half dozen more window managers to choose, has wireless networking tools, and a remastering tool to spin your own.
i3 and NetSurf made that extremely possible. Mind you, the only things that didn't work well were Firefox (wouldn't launch due to OOM) and compiling Rust projects. Single translation units in Rust would immediately OOM the system, whereas C, C++, etc. worked fine.