Tiny Core vs. Puppy vs. Crunchbang - Which is the best lightweight Linux distro?

[snowpine]

My vote is CrunchBang.

I was surprised not to see SliTaz on your list, I much prefer it to Puppy.

[TeamRocket1233c]

That's cool. I just hadn't read too much into SliTaz.

[lykwydchykyn]

I like tinkering with tinycore, and I've installed slitaz numerous times just checking it out.

But for actual usage, I just usually install a minimal Debian install and build a lightweight desktop from scratch. If you have enough RAM, even an old PII will do well.

[TeamRocket1233c]

That would also work with a perfectly modern, adequately powered system too, and it would boot and in general work faster than say Windows Vista or Windows 7, although both are relatively fast on modern hardware.

But Tiny Core is perfect if you wanna do a lot of hacking to get your OS set up, and OpenBSD is the same way.

[TeamRocket1233c]

BTW, I'm running Crunchbang on my PC currently, and it runs great on it, despite my hardware being freaking ANCIENT!!

Might go ahead, if I manage to get a fairly recent PC, something with a Pentium 4 preferably, and put Crunchbang on that, as if it'll run on a PII~266-based PC with 128 megs of RAM with no problem, it'll run laps around Windows XP, Vista, or 7, or even Ubuntu, Debian, or Fedora on a P4~2GHz-based PC with about a gig or two of RAM.

Also, considering using Puppy 5.2.8 to rehabilitate an old Gateway PC from 2000 that has been considered dead for a while due to the Windows 98 install that it shipped with originally basically dying, and that thing has 63 megs of RAM, and from what I read in Puppy's Wikipedia article, it's capable of running on 48 megs, and its CPU, a Celeron~433, should be plenty for Puppy.

[KdotJ]

My vote would go to ArchBang, as its what I use for a simple lightweight distro. Arch if you have the time (and patience!)...

[TeamRocket1233c]

OpenBSD's also a good choice if you have the time and patience.

[andrew.46]

Another good 'lightweight' choice would be Slackware 13.37 with Fluxbox. Works nicely here on reasonably minimal hardware...

[kazuya]

Of those three choices, Crunchbang is the most feature-rich. But if you are looking for the best choice in terms of speed and functionality, none comes close to "Archbang"

It comes with openbox, flash, etc, and is ridiculously fast if you can get past using pacman -S packagename to install things. It uses considerably less RAM to run even when installed compared to any of the others.

Vectorlinux and Salix (slack-based) are great alternatives as well. They are almost as fast as Archbang, but have the bonus of a graphical software package manager.

Laptops where Lubuntu and Mepis antiX would run very slowly, archbang even similar DE runs significantly faster.

[TeamRocket1233c]

I like tinkering with tinycore, and I've installed slitaz numerous times just checking it out.

But for actual usage, I just usually install a minimal Debian install and build a lightweight desktop from scratch. If you have enough RAM, even an old PII will do well.

Hey, you could make Tiny Core plenty usable with enough tweaks. For example, starting off with an Openbox WM, and adding Tint2 as the panel, as well as whatever other software you wanna add, would add some serious usability points right there, considering TC already comes with a dock.