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

[TeamRocket1233c]

Good ideas guys.

[wolfen69]

Another option is to do a minimal install of Ubuntu, then install a lightweight Desktop Environment, like LXDE or IceWM. If you don't want to do very much tweaking, Crunchbang and Puppy are good options to.

Doing a minimal install is always fun too. It can be very fast and efficient. But for an ancient pc, I might opt for 10.04 or earlier.

[TeamRocket1233c]

Doing a full-blown install is always better though, and ancient hardware isn't the only hardware that lightweight distros are good for. They'll also fly on modern hardware.

And speaking of Tiny Core, another good example of a real minimal OS that would be perfect if you wanna do a lot of tweaking/hacking to get it set up, although not Linux, is OpenBSD.

[jjex22]

Doing a full-blown install is always better though, and ancient hardware isn't the only hardware that lightweight distros are good for. They'll also fly on modern hardware.

And speaking of Tiny Core, another good example of a real minimal OS that would be perfect if you wanna do a lot of tweaking/hacking to get it set up, although not Linux, is OpenBSD.

I wouldn't say the main 3 BSD flavours (Free, Open, Net) are designed to be minimal in the same way puppy/core are - they are meant to be full featured, they just start you off at the CLI like Arch, Gentoo, minimal installs of Ubuntu, Fedora, debian etc. I do think that building your own system from a minimal install is a really good idea, though I take back my advice of Gentoo; that's just where I started - it's more of a pain to maintain than others- I'd go with the advice of IWantFroyo or wolfen69 and start with Arch or minimal Ubuntu, but to be honest you can use any distro or BSD that lets you install a minimal environment - if you wanted BSD, I'd suggest that FreeBSD has the most active support forums as well as the most packages of these systems.

Edit: maybe not take back Gentoo - it is crazy configurable, but the learning curve is steep, I'd say recommend with a warning - it was the first text install I did and it took me 2 weeks of evenings and weekends, with countless start overs - I got to that stage where I could get all the way through to compiling my kernel without looking at the manual 'coz I messed up so many times. And it does give you the most control with USE flags - I loved it for a long time, but it does take a lot of work to maintain, so, my warning is it's fantastic for learning how GNU/Linux (and all *nix) systems work, and for getting everything how you want it, but one day you will delete it!

[TeamRocket1233c]

Hmm...

[wolfen69]

Best thing to do is try a lot of things and learn as much as you can. Nothing can take the place of experience.

[TeamRocket1233c]

Agreed.

[daftlad]

I have been using Bodhi on my old laptop and am getting to like it a lot. It uses the Enlightenment desktop and is based on ubuntu.


http://www.bodhilinux.com/

[TeamRocket1233c]

Sweet!

[Paddy Landau]

On the other hand, if you want to load an Ubuntu-based distro and just "go" without having to tweak, why don't you look at Lubuntu. It's lightweight -- not as light as Puppy or Tiny, obviously -- but good for smaller spec machines, and is fully part of the Ubuntu family.