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.
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].
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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. ;)
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Java didn't only run on one OS but for whatever reason Oracle seems to find no value in making its UI stack nicer and modern. It seems only Microsoft's C# stack is working on this. There's also Qt, which is not a single-OS solution, but its C++.
Well, there is JavaFX, which is really nice for modern java desktop UI's. However, Swing can be taken really really far - just look at IntelliJ and friends (most people don't even realize they're Swing UI's).
With that said - most modern applications are webapps for good reasons. Making native apps sucks for a lot of reasons - including all the random OS-specific behavior you have to work around, specific versions of native OS libraries, etc.
Building for the web browser means, without any extra effort, you app works on all operating systems, and it works exactly the same. That's a pretty good sell to anyone trying to make a modern application that's mostly just a front-end UI for an API...
I think it's got a certain "cool" factor. For some types of content in some cases it might also make sense, almost like a slideshow or paginated document, allowing each jump have its own self-contained focus.
For example this page has action buttons and community links with a video on the first page, a written blurb about system configuration on the second page, screenshots/visual showcase on the third page, etc.
Personally I'm on the fence. I think it probably more often than not tends to be annoying, like most overrides of default conventions, and feels more like you're being force-fed marketing instead of reading information. This specific page would probably work just as well if they kept the sections, dividers, and even the animations, but just let you scroll naturally.
But then, maybe it gets them more downloads or something.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.)
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.
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?
Indeed - different classes of users will have different perceptions. I never understood why anyone would feel ruffled by different applications using different UI libraries...
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.
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.
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.
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.."
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.
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"!
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
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?
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.
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.)
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.
I don't consider this very mini. Not when compared with the likes of slitaz, puppy, or Tiny Core. Or how this would be better that usb specific distros like porteus and slax.
Just last week I was talking about running linux from a tiny usb drive and trying that as an escape from Windows 11.
My thinking was that rather than lugging a laptop back and forth from work to home, I would just have a computer at each, and just bring my USB key with.
My co-workers said everything would feel slow, but with 500mb/s usb thumb drives with 512gb, I think it should be fine.
Full live distribution ISO's can be prepared on a FAT32 stick and booted using Syslinux rather than the Isolinux bootloader used for the "DVD".
Or you can use GRUB for an EXTx type volume instead of FAT32.
Some of the major distributions are about 4GB now, and with most PC's having 4GB or more of memory, once booted the whole thing runs from memory, often with no default ability for further routine user reads or writes to the live stick once booted.
Alternatively the distribution of choice can be installed to a blank formatted stick instead of an internal drive. Instead of run live from the USB where there is no default persistence to any apps you may "install" while booted live.
It's not really that slow any more, the initial full write to the stick is usuallly the only frustrating time-consuming operation.
Booting to the stick is also slower than booting to an internal drive, often not by much though, and once booted there is so much that then runs from memory, there are not that many additional reads or writes to push through the USB bottleneck.
Get yourself a full-performance USB 3.x stick, something like Sandisk Extreme and a full size distribution will boot just as fast as something mini on a cheap USB3.0 stick:
These minis would boot reeally fast on a full-performance stick like that.
Window To Go also does quite well once booting it from the stick has taken place. The latest Windows 10 32-bit ISO when deployed in CompactOS mode only takes up less than 4GB and it boots just as fast from a stick as a full Linux of the same size. Compared to Linux there is some lag in some operations since Windows does a lot more reads & writes during operation than Linux usually needs. Unfortunately there's been no new W10 ISO in quite some time, so the first Windows Update makes it use more than two additional GB of storage. Still takes up only a little more than 1GB of RAM for W10x32 if you push in that direction, but 32-bit can only properly access somewhat less than 4GB of RAM no matter how much memory you have in excess of that. This may be enough free memory for many uses still these days though.
Even Windows 11 to Go without using compactOS, which uses about 20GB of drive storage to start with, runs just as good once booted. It just takes that much more time proportionately when booting to transfer more GB from the stick to the memory before you reach the deaktop.
os for containers need to be small. eg Alpine Linux: the tiny os underneath a ton of docker containers has been downloaded > 1 billion times. But the website for miniOS seems to have design in mind which is at odds with this use case. Alpine's website is bland and unexciting - which appeals to me ;).
Laptops typically have 8 GB or more RAM which is a lot more than you need of r a lightweight OS; perhaps the rest could be used as a cache that is periodically flushed to the USB. For most uses of such a device there isn't much writing going on anyway.
Hah! Nice. I tried to do this a while ago with MX Linux. Biggest thing IIRC was to disable swap and tune disk/buffer write sync thresholds, both so you're not burning too many write cycles and also so applications can get away with writing to "disk" without stuttering on IO across slow USB ports.
The usefulness day-to-day is pretty limited, however, assuming you're just carrying it around and also have access to proper installations.
Does it come with sources and can it compile/produce a new distribution of itself? So I could modify the sources just a little bit and get a new version by executing a command like 'make' etc. ?
Just yesterday I flashed a USB drive with Puppy Linux and modified it to start Emacs on boot so that I would have my editor wherever I go. Looking forward to trying this distro!
In their home page they state: "We make MiniOS beautiful so that you can enjoy using it every day and for any task. We pay great attention to every detail in the operating system", and there are mentions to Mandriva, Debian, even Fluxbox, nowhere Xfce is mentioned, it's almost like they are implying the aforementioned qualities are their merit alone.
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/