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musha68k
Medox
Sadly, TinyCore [1] is hardly mentioned anymore when tiny distros are discussed, although still in development [2]. Maybe it's still just for a small niche of users, even after 15 years, but you can start with only 17MB's and add only the desired extensions [3].
[2] http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,26201.0.html
[3] http://tinycorelinux.net/14.x/x86/tcz/
(not sure what their beef is with https...)
I do miss the times when their microcore was around 6-8MB's
slim
it is IMHO the best distro for the USB drive use case, because the USB drive is still DOS formatted and you can use it as any USB drive. It's also super fast, because it runs on ramdisk, and forgets everything you did not explicitly save once you restart. It also has d-core which gives you access to all Debian packages https://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/doku.php?id=dcore:welcome
ajsnigrutin
The "mini" distros were fun in the time of 128mb usb sticks, where you had to find some tiny distro to fit onto it...
But now, i can buy a 128gb usb drive for ~7eur at my local supermarket, why even bother with "mini"? Just install a full ubuntu, apt-get install everything else needed, possibly neded or just "nice to have", and you still have 115gb free for other stuff. Split the drive into two partitions and have one encrypted for private data, and you're done.
chrismorgan
Strange the things that stick in your memory. APC magazine from mid-2003, Lindows OS Live CD on the cover, and somewhere in the text inside the corresponding article, “—pair it with a cheap-as-chips 128 MB USB disk for $70—” (that’s Australian dollars; and the wording may be inexact). I was always curious what kind of fish-and-chips shops they were going to where chips cost $70. And yeah, now twenty years later you can get a thousand times the capacity for a tenth of the inflation-adjusted price, and it’s maybe 10–100× faster for vaguely comparable units and loads.
chrisweekly
"stick in your memory"
haha, great word choices in a discussion about memory sticks.
WillAdams
One convenience which I miss is the distributions which would mount NTFS and allow installation into a directory --- very convenient and made for a very low bar of entry.
globular-toast
Question for anybody who knows: what is actually the best way for younglings to experience computing these days? USB sticks were the thing when I was growing up because PCs were ubiquitous and people would accept trying it out as long as you promised it wouldn't harm their precious Windows installation. Is that still true, though? People seem to have more phones and tablets and stuff that can't boot from USB. Are things like Raspberry Pi the way to go?
rashkov
Also wondering about this. Raspberry pi is probably a good way, yeah. Some others could be setting up an old laptop with Linux on it, or showing them how to hack a Chromebook (via crostini), or help them explore their steam deck which is already running Arch Linux.
I think the bigger question is how to inspire someone to be interested in open source. You’d have to find something that you can do in Linux but not in another OS.
Maybe show them how to host a web server. Or show them some screenshots of how cool a customized Linux desktop can look. Would be curious to hear some more ideas
G3rn0ti
> [1] http://www.fli4l.de
I remember using it (or rather a predecessor of that I believe) to turn a Pentium-II class PC without hard drive into a fully functioning router to share my broad band internet connection with a neighbor back in the early 2000s where direct dial-up was still a thing even with broadband. It was an easy, mostly pre-configured setup. We had to power-cycle the PC every couple of weeks because it halted sometimes but other than it worked like charm and was actually running from a single 3.5" HD floppy. (For the younger audience: floppies were looking like 3D printed save buttons. ;)
kiney
I also fondly remember setting up fli4l on a single floppy disk to share the ISDN internet connection over coaxial cable 10mbit ethernet in my parents home when I was still a kid.
xcrunner529
Mine was PhatLinux (remember that?). I finally got it downloaded over dial up and a download manager after weeks on dial up. It was so cool to use.
harrygeez
If I understand this correctly, you are turning a computer into a router for another computer? Why would you do this?
I'm obviously a youngling
G3rn0ti
In Germany about 20 years ago people were still doing dial-up using a broadband (DSL) modem. The provider wouldn't give you a routing device but only a bare-bones giant modem. When still living with my parents I remember rolling off an ethernet cable across the apartment every night connecting my PC with the broadband modem and then invoking a bash script initiating a PPPoE (point-to-point over ethernet) dial up connection to the service provider. That was before WiFi and even before home routers were a thing. Probably back until 2002 or 2003.
Edit: This is how my first DSL modem (without routing facility) looked like: https://www.teltarif.de/arch/2009/kw27/10jahredsl-rueckblick...
rashkov
I assume it was so they could share the connection among two computers
O1111OOO
I love this. I ran Puppy Linux in USB mode, many years ago, for a year or two (Netbook, load to RAM, save changes to USB). It was the most comfortable I ever felt using a computer. I used my laptop's HD as a pure data drive for large files only.
Puppy encrypted the entire OS on USB. So it would boot fine but needed to be decrypted during the boot process.
It contained all my apps, system settings and smaller files (docs, html, passwords, personal docs, etc) that I decided to save in the encrypted OS/USB.
The laptop's mounted HD contained the larger stuff... tons of videos, pics, etc.. basically all the stuff I didn't really need to protect/encrypt.
Someone could steal the laptop and I wouldn't care (all that large stuff is always backed up too on externals). Someone could steal the USB and they'd have to know it was a bootable, encrypted USB. Even so, they'd also need to know how to decrypt on boot. I felt so safe even when traveling.
I could also plug my USB into any laptop and BOOM! ready to go:-) It was like a plug-n-play super-power.
I saw MiniOS listed here and I immediately thought of my old Puppy setup. Looking forward to giving this OS a spin. I hope it considers my use case in their thinking (though I'm sure I can tweak it easily to fulfill my needs).
tombh
Puppy was what got me into Linux! An old laptop was struggling with Windows and Puppy just breathed the most amazing fresh and sprightly life into it. That was over 15 years ago and I've used Linux everyday since.
O1111OOO
> Puppy just breathed the most amazing fresh and sprightly life into it.
Yes! This was it exactly. Running Puppy in RAM on my old netbook was amazing:-)
herbst
Same here. OpenSuse was missing a driver or so (can't remember) but puppy just worked on my old, even then, computer. Haven't used anything else than Linux since.
kwhitefoot
> I ran Puppy Linux in USB mode, many years ago, for a year or two
If it was so good why did you stop?
I used Puppy too a while ago but found that once I wanted to run something that the Puppy guys hadn't packaged that it was a bit more work to install things. That's probably not the case now that there is a Debian based Pup, perhaps I should consider trying again.
O1111OOO
> If it was so good why did you stop?
This was maybe 14 years ago. I sold the netbook and started using Windows full time again. I was still in this middle state between using Linux and Windows - going back and forth between the two.
When I decided the leave Windows completely (Windows 10 spyware release summer/2015), I settled on a full-featured distro. I did some serious homework, a bit of distro-hopping and finally settled on Linux Mint Cinnamon.
You are right, sometimes (often) installing must have apps on Puppy was a challenge - this was a factor now that I was a full-time Linux user.
As a full time (still newbie user), I wanted access to every tool in the Linux world in the easiest way possible. I didn't want to hit a wall that might cause me to consider using Windows again.
leidenfrost
Is it me? Or did Linux become boring from a hobbyist perspective?
Exploring the system was fun as f*ck in a geeky way.
Now I just go the fastest route to a Kde install
mbakke
Probably you just grew up.
I hope kids today find the weird world of user-friendly operating systems (license- and tinkering-wise) just as interesting as we once did.
tetris11
I blame systemd for this. Hacking together a few rc.d scripts was way more fun than putting a systemd recipe together, though I do admit that systemd is good and necessary from a stability POV.
imp0cat
The netbook wave kinda faded away, what device are you considering?
giancarlostoro
This is one of those sites that hijacks your scrolling, which I wish there was a standard for "please just let me scroll freely". It's not super awful but its kind of annoying, I like to read things on either the top or bottom edge of my browser window so I dont lose my spot.
BLKNSLVR
Well off-topic:
Scroll bars universally suck nowadays. Maybe my "mouse accuracy" isn't what it used to be - since giving up first person shooters 16 years ago - but I shouldn't need railgun accuracy to hit a fucking scroll bar 99% of the time. Why are they a single pixel wide these days, it's not like screen-width is expensive real-estate these days, is this Apple/Ive design principles gone mad? And then there's the page resizing when the scroll bar appears that makes it look as if the whole screen has refreshed, and then it re-refreshes without the scroll-bar in the intervening time that I paused my actions wondering why the screen refreshed in the first place.
/end old man rant.
giancarlostoro
I agree. I've also noticed, ctrl + c, ctrl + v fails really often, especially on chat apps, and I realized why: they'll copy your chatbox contents (empty) if you accidentally press ctrl + c, and so whatever you copied is now gone. I was going nuts because it could happen to me on every single OS I would use, copy and paste is like being destroyed by "helpful" application designs. If I'm not highlighting text, don't copy for me!
I'm looking at you Teams, Discord and maybe Slack?
globular-toast
Rarely does a day go by without some frustration caused by tools trying to be clever. Garbage software like Teams and Discord is usually the culprit. Using this kind of software is less about sending commands and more begging for behaviour and hoping the beg is interpreted in an unsurprising way.
Propelloni
I feel your pain, but the accidental clipboard overwrite can be mitigated by using a clipboard manager. Every GNU/Linux DE installs one by default and you can access it via tray app or pressing Meta+v.
Turns out MS Windows has one, too, since Windows 10. Here you press the Windows Logo Key + v.
progval
With Firefox, go to about:config and toggle layout.css.scrollbar-width-thin.disabled to true. You might want to toggle widget.gtk.overlay-scrollbars.enabled to false too, so the scrollbar isn't automatically hidden when unusused.
SoftTalker
The page-up and page-down keys, as well as the arrow keys, should also work for scrolling, but often don't because of hijacked scrolling events.
gdprrrr
Also space, shift-space, home, end, and middle-click-drag
WanderPanda
Thats why I love the minimap in VS code, it is basically an enlarged scrollbar!
ploum
It is sad because I was interested but my first thought was "if you can’t make a basic usable webpage, how can I trust you to make a minimal usable operating system". And I closed the tab.
esskay
Yup did the same. I wont browse sites that have these idiotic scroll takeovers, it's incredibly poor for UX.
JohnMakin
Did exactly the same!
demandingturtle
That's a bit harsh. If it was from a web dev company, sure. But this is from someone doing it as a hobby for the good of mankind. Yeah, the might not work for some people but it's not the end of the world. It's like saying that girl has one strand of hair out of place so I'm not going to date her. You must be fun to be around.
alpaca128
It takes effort to break scrolling on a website. It's not something that just happens unexpectedly, it's a conscious decision to prioritize fancy animations over accessibility.
mrd3v0
I don't believe it is harsh given how this is a critique of the philosophy that permits a programmer to needlessly hijack user input. Especially given the context here is an OS, AND a supposedly minimalist one at that.
P.S: Last sentence probably violates HN guidelines and is just rude and unnecessary if you want to prove a point.
undefined
Jeff_Brown
Jesus. As a visually impaired person who needs to scroll almost line by line, this is horrible.
Pfiffer
Real question: Why is this even allowed at a browser level?
MenhirMike
Because some people think that Browsers should be the ultimate app platform, so hijacking your inputs or preventing proper zoom makes sense to them even though it's utterly user hostile.
giancarlostoro
Which has led us to regress in terms of building GUI desktop apps. Remember the 2000s and 90s how you could make a somewhat native UI in Visual Basic 6 and Delphi, now you got to use an entire browser to get there.
emchammer
It's not just browsers, though. I have to scroll harder in News.app than in other MacOS applications. Real question: Why do designers do this?
hutzlibu
Because you can make all sorts of games and apps with the browser now, which is very cool. In my game the scrolling is just a fast way to zoom in and out and there it is no text to scroll, so it is very appropriate.
But yes, the downside is that some people think that websites, that really just should be pages, get gamified and abused like this.
winrid
Webkit has lots of "advanced" flags. We should add this as one!
Qwertious
Because stuff like that is what makes www.territorial.io possible
dekken_
it's super obnoxious, even when it's only slight sensitivity changes (which it isn't here) I notice it and feel violated
Narishma
I also hijacks the back button.
a3w
I had no idea I could scroll. So: don't scroll, if pages use this antipattern.
After reading the hint here, and trying it out, my back stack is polluted a lot.
thisOtterBeGood
It can be a nice tool but you can make mistakes. You should always visualize the scroll progress. In this instance for each scroll-tick they should move a focus or selection indicator over the screenshots, so that you feel your scroll progress...
Edit: I went back... not they don't even recognize small scroll ticks, they just ignore them... :) You have to violently scroll to progress.
ulrikrasmussen
Arg! I literally get dizzy when sites do this. When I scroll on the mouse, I seem to subconsciously move my eyes in anticipation of the text moving, and when it moves unexpectedly I get disoriented.
neilv
You can also make your own USB drive mini-distro, atop Debian.
With LilDeb, I made a layer atop Debian Live, including an optional mutable partition, and curated a package mix and configs for it: https://www.neilvandyke.org/lildeb/
suprjami
That sounds awesome but it's been 13 years since the last update, does it still work?
neilv
As the very top of the page says, I'm not maintaining it, and I preserved it online. It's an example of a way to make your own distro. Considerable work went into the `build-lildeb` script that is a single file to define the distro in a simple and lightweight way. (This was before Dockerfiles, so maybe newer then, but it's still practical.)
suprjami
Oh it's your project, cool.
A current implementation of the same abilities is probably the source used to spin SpiralLinux. I haven't tried this myself but it at least looks possible.
kwhitefoot
What I would like to see is a brief discussion of why one should use MiniOS instead of, say Puppy, Slitaz, Tiny Core, etc. I might try it out anyway.
clnq
I’m probably going to make some Linux desktop guys mad, but the page says “Attention to detail” and then proceeds to show very many desktop window screenshots where the styles are very inconsistent. Font sizes, margins around elements, menu bar styles, title bar styles and naming conventions, one of the windows has an application icon in the title, but only one, the icon sizes are very different. What’s the point of saying “attention to detail” and then showing this?
amelius
Apparently, those are not the important details.
liotier
Indeed - different classes of users will have different perceptions. I never understood why anyone would feel ruffled by different applications using different UI libraries...
somethingAlex
It just seems odd in this context given they are willfully compiling these screenshots together, displaying them prominently, and saying they pay attention to details. What details are they trying to highlight here, if not the UI details?
In general the UI doesn't even look good. It's just a bunch of unflattering grey.
giantg2
Reminds me of DSL - Damn Small Linux. Only those were the days of running on a floppy.
hiAndrewQuinn
Or Puppy Linux! The first day I popped that CD drive in and was able to run the internet browser ten times faster than I ever could on my decrepit family computer was a magical moment for me. It made me realize just how much power was being wasted on things I neither knew nor cared about under the surface.
autumn-antlers
I liked this post about Puppy Linux so much it's linked on my home page (nvm that i dont have any other pages):
https://artemis.sh/2022/07/15/decision-making-is-finite.html
Might have less to do with the post and more to do with my own fond memories of Puppy and it's community
anthk
Today I used the opposite approach. I began with Debian, next SuSE8, Knoppix, Aurox, Debian Sarge for lots of years, and, after OpenBSD, I use Hyperbola with a pretty sparse cwm with uxterm, links+, and for music/podcasts I use two scripts: sfeed_download, anonradio, tpradio and amused playing my collections at random. No bling bling, almost no features with sfeed.
helpfulContrib
In my very early days with Linux, my side-distraction 386 had been running a hand-cobbled kernel, cross-compiled, no network access, and then with some rootfs and bin tools built by following some obscure thing I read on minix-list.
And it was fine for me to log in and poke at it, for a while - after all, I only used it as a side hack thing while I waited for my work-related MIPS pizzabox and other things to do their other thing, for which I was paid, at the time.
But then came Yggdrasil.
I 'temporarily' yanked the CD drive out of my bosses 486 editing/gaming machine, popped the floppy into da' box, flipped the switch, and up she booted in glorious VGA 640x400.
A kind-of working X workstation, which .. everyone in the dev team .. found it kind of an astonishing feat for this much belittled 386 toy. "Okay then, we've got an extra term .. do the network drivers work?", as we chortled at the frequency flop.
And so it began. Oh, what a world that little kernel has wrought, and I am eternally grateful for the fact of its existence, my ability to use it and push it out into the wide, wide world personally, and so on.
The USB boots are great. Totally down for Terabyte+FAST USB sticks, though, sooner or later .. I mean, "my bootable USB stick is a compute stick, kthx.."
What a ride.
downrightmike
That's a name I haven't heard of in a long while http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ 50MB ISO, last release was in 2008, a year before the first version of MiniOS came out.
kiney
I remember burning that 50MB iso on a credit card sized CD an carrying it in my wallet all the time back then...
gattilorenz
muLinux (live distro based on a modular set of floppy disks, including X11 and gcc... and somewhat questionable English grammar) and the Knoppix CD and later DVD were pretty cool too. Oh, and tomsrtbt, "the most GNU/Linux on a floppy disk"!
anthk
Then there was Nehabodi, Nethack 3.4.3 in a floppy disk.
thisismyhna
DSL was one of my first Linux distros. Loved the small credit card size cd it had.
hk1337
I remember running Linux on a floppy disk back in the 90s. Used it as a NAT between the school network and my computer(s) in my room.
Pretty cool to see the functionality increase with portability. Although, floppy disk space is significantly less than a USB drive.
gpribeiro
Coyote Linux, maybe? I used it at home in the beginning of the 2000s.
rzzzt
There's a famous single floppy router distribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Router_Project
LGR has a video on a PC-based appliance (a wireless access point) where the "firmware" source was a walled-off 3.5" drive with a floppy inside. That one ran DR-DOS however: https://youtu.be/DOkapxbW93g
hk1337
I believe that was it but Coyote Linux sounds familiar too. I think it perhaps used that distribution.
suprjami
I used Freesco ("Free Cisco") to do the same. It's hilarious these days to think about a power-hungry 486 running full time to do such a trivial task.
squarefoot
Came for the interesting headline on HN, left after 10 seconds because of the horrible unusable webpage.
Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL
I thought it couldn't be that bad but... it's bad...
Make it need JavaScript so you can make scrolling into a slow, clunky slideshow where the text has additional delay before appearing... Absolutely brilliant /s
Good example of modern bad website design... at least in my opinion. Sigh... that's what web frameworks and the 10 layers of complexity are for right?
neilv
Who is going to use a distro from a Web site with a yandex.ru tracker?
lionkor
That's no different from a google or other big corp tracker. So, you either block it, or you live with it, but there is nothing about yandex that should bother you more than google.
neilv
It hints that the people providing the distro are likely subject to different pressures than the people who operate 99% of the sites we normally see on HN. (Those other sites unfortunately also usually use corporate trackers, but different ones.)
usr1106
The news link goes to Telegram and the channel has lots of messages in Russian.
lakomen
If I was traveling a lot it could be useful to have a Linux on USB always with me.
But then I'd also like to have a backup solution
Let's assume this would become your main OS. It would need to run on any hardware, that means support for l the archs, or at least x86 and arm (in the broadest sense). And it would need lightweight (in the actual sense) backups. I'm thinking about a backup station where you insert you main OS stick before you go to bed. It would have 2 drives, in case 1 fails. And an ethernet port (or wifi additionally) for external backups.
So you insert it, go to bed and when you wake up you have internal and external backups.
But I think that there aren't too many people interested in having their main OS on a USB drive.
One might have to provide a cpu/ram/drive bay along with it. And there would need to be a simple drive swapping process and low cost case replacement option. USB should not bottleneck the data transfer rates.
So I searched and of course something similar already exists. But not the way I envisioned it. A USB 3.2 to m.2 adapter, with its own power supply, and a sata 3 port where you can plug in a drive to create or restore backups. No ethernet port or network connectivity.
My vision is a case, a station, that does incremental backups to 2 slot inserted drives and optionally to (configurable) remote targets in sequence.
The USB port would need to be high quality.
Would I support SATA? No, maybe. Initially only m.2 connectors.
kwijibob
For projects like this the first thing I like to look at is a ChangeLog. That gives you a sense of the momentum.
If you click on the "News" menu item, you need to have Telegram app installed. :(
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Although most distros should work out of the box these days (I think?) nothing beats these smaller ones for interested people and especially “younglings” to try out; “running from a stick”.
My first contact with Linux/Unix was through fli4l [1] an open source boot-from-floppy Linux router with which I shared our family’s intermittent 56k dial-up (!) links back in the day (I believe from 2000 onwards it was a single channel ISDN line; what a dream).
Then there was the famous Knoppix [2] distro; coming with many German computer magazines at least.
So yeah, all in all I’m more of a *BSD “graduate” (main reason being man pages were usually of higher quality; at the time at least) but to this day my favourite flash’n boot distro is still Debian based “headless CLI first” GRML Linux [3] (came with pre-configured zsh way before it was cool, lots of networking tools etc, a Swiss Army knife for the sysadmin).
I had been running an old underclocked PC with it as a router and for NFS - for years and only until somewhat recently.
[1] http://www.fli4l.de
[2] http://knoppix.net/
[3] https://grml.org/