50MB operating system can resurrect your old PC | Hacker News Reader

50MB operating system can resurrect your old PC

makeuseof.com

48 pointsmakerdiety27 comments

Unless your PC is older than like twenty years, there's absolutely no reason you must use DSL or any distro that includes pre-x86_64 support. Gnome3 might be a little heavy on super crappy hardware but anything that comes prepackaged with XFCE is perfect for an older PC (Xubuntu, Linux Mint, Debian, etc).

Isn't 32-bit lighter on RAM use?

I agree. I looked at DSL, TinyCore, Puppy, and then decided to try a “regular modern distribution”. I have an 11-year-old, early 2015 MacBook Air with an i5, 4gb of ram, and a weak battery, and have turned it into a nicely usable “couch terminal” with Fedora Sway Atomic. It was a good excuse to jump into a tiling wm, and I chose Fedora Atomic out of curiosity and a desire to have a stable base OS even if my battery died in the middle of an update.

But I could have gone with XFCE or Cinnamon or any of the other lighter-weight desktop environments and had a great experience, because it runs great. I have the cpu power pinned low while on battery, but on AC it’s quite fast. I could replace the battery for around $30, but it’s a different kind of project to try to make it work as well as possible for as long as possible.

I also recommend tinycorelinux (TCL) if you want even more minimalism: http://tinycorelinux.net/

I personally once used this where it simply only had pdf ability and not a browser or anything else and I have used TCL to resurrect one of my older pc's into making it just work and I can even install many applications. This is a 12-15 year old Dell inspiron mini with 1gb ram. I also love its aesthetics so much and it is so cute when it runs TCL and I sort of used it as a second monitor to run pomodorokitty for sometime as well (all thanks to TCL!)

I really really love TCL so much, the smallest version is 17mb, I highly recommend giving it a try if you have free time, I feel as if people can really appreciate the intentional minimalism within the project :-D

Tiny Core requires less than 50 MB of RAM and a 486. I like DSL but I’ve come to appreciate Tiny Core more. If you have a use case for an extremely light Linux system I recommend it. (I like it for single app GUI VMs.)

Agreed, Tiny Core Linux is made exactly to run on old and low-powered PCs. But you can think of a more radical solution: take inspiration from Tiny Core and, using frontier LLMs, build your own tiny and personal Linux. With this solution expect a long work, but in the end you will have a system designed for you, that fits your needs perfectly.

This may be appropriate for embedded devices that don’t have a network connection, but it would be a lot of work to keep a fully custom distro up-to-date and secure, even with LLM assistance.

Implementing a network stack, maybe with reduced functions and written directly in C and/or Assembly, should keep the size of the OS low. It's a lot of work, and at some point you will need to make a careful evaluation between the effort and the result you want to reach. Also it wouldn't be bad if you allowed a certain margin of flexibility: 60 MB instead of 50 MB shouldn't be a big problem, and a lot of assembly code fits in 10 MB. For updates you need to plan a dedicated repository, because the software has to be dedicated, not use packages from the standard distros. Yes, a hyper-optimized 50 MB system is a lot of work, and in fact embedded systems generally have very outdated software versions.

You went from building a personal Linux (doable but probably not worth it) to building your own OS with bespoke network stack.

Honestly, I’m skeptical that this would be worthwhile unless the new OS itself is the end goal. There’s no shortage of hobby OSes (many now built by some lone dev using AI), but among these projects, most don’t make it past the first point release.

Even thinking your way through the requirements of a small OS is a lot of work. It’s not impossible, but unless you want to get into OS dev, it’s probably not worth the energy when there are already a number of decent options.

Building an OS is a demanding job, and it becomes even more so if you decide to make the work public, because at that point you take on a commitment towards the people who follow you. If the project stays for private and personal use, well, an LLM helps us and then we update the work when we feel like it and have the time. LLMs are an extraordinary tool, but they don't answer the questions "what do you want to do with it?", "are you able to take on and keep a commitment?". As with all things in life, it's always a question of balance: how much do we want to spend for a tool that maybe could turn out to be not very useful? And what is useful? A 50 MB OS might not have many practical uses, but it would force us to study, and a lot. Could you put a price on learning new things?

Not everyone has the time or inclination. I would even say that most don’t.

With some learning and patience, I think I would have the capability to make an exceptional modded car that has interesting features. But I’m just not interested in spending my time that way!

Bodhi Linux may be a better idea: https://www.bodhilinux.com/

Not sure if it will get more updates in the future.

I may consider this for the future: https://github.com/JeffHoogland/moksha

I literally saw this in the first paragraph of the website and it feels like it was written with AI:

> It’s more than just software—it’s a statement.

I know us engineers aren't the best writers, but when I see things like this, it feels like they're not even trying to write their own content.

I don't know who wrote this, but it is unlikely AI wrote it.

The main guy is an older engineer with a lot of health struggles. And yes, he is American. Born American as far as I can tell. His health was once so bad, he asked for private donations. Unfortunately, I was not aware of it at that time; otherwise I would have posted it to HN.

Or go straight to the distro DSL was forked from - antiX, which has a Debian Trixie-based 32-bit ISO (as well as the expected 64-bit version):

https://antixlinux.com/download/

I don't really understand why people choose such incredibly political distros willingly. Like, if it's ok for your distro to be political under your desires and force that opinion on users; surely it's fine for the conservatives or tech oligarchs (pick your conspiracy) to politically demand an os with tracking and mandatory id verification? Surely what's good for the goose is good for the gander?

antiX doesn't "force" anything on anyone, it's not "opinionated" like Omarchy, for example. It even offers a multitude of window managers and inits to choose from.

It's antifascist of course, but that is (or at least used to be) an uncontroversial position.

A decade old PC didn't come with Windows 7, which shipped 17 years ago. It would have windows 10, which shipped 11 years ago, or conceivably 8.1 but I would doubt it. 4gb ram is also too small for that era.

Yeah the decade old thing is wrong. A Sandy Bridge i3 would have come out in 2011. More like 15 years ago.

I'm guessing this is the laptop they are talking about:

https://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/dell-inspiron-14z-...

4GB RAM should have been too small for that era. But there’s still 4GB laptops with windows sold brand new today: https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-omnibook-3-laptop-16t-b...

Probably because the AI industry created a memory shortage and they want to keep the price down.

Windows 11, meanwhile, is more bloated than ever.

This isn't an ai caused problem

Yes, it is.

https://www.google.com/search?q=laptops+with+low+memory+spec...

4GB, old? With 4GB of RAM and ZRAM Alpine with a light DE will fly, and any modern browser with UBlock Origin will open most web sites like nothing.

I'm running Windows 10 on a 18 year old PC (2008 Intel Q9300, 8 GB RAM)

It works for browsing the web and various non-intensive apps.

Core i, 4GB RAM is old? Naw dawg.

In my day, we used a boot disk to restart without Windows 95 so we could run Doom with 8mb RAM

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