Fantastic to have another option with modern tools! great work that will be appreciated by many. Between this, Puppy, and Tiny Core Linux so much old hardware can be put to potential use. I’d also mention Finnix as an excellent rescue image solution. Any other awesome projects for limited hardware and Linux use that should be more well known?
I've been quite happy with Alpine Linux. You can build it up to suit your needs for desktop, server, embedded or containers, but will run quite speedily on any supported arch from a few tens of MB of memory. The APK package manager is pleasant and quick, and the package list is quite extensive.
Wow I've never heard of someone running Alpine as a desktop OS before. How is the experience without glibc? What are you using for a DE? I'd thought X relied on glibc
I've run musk based distro for a couple of years with no trouble (KISS Linux and now some hacked up Alpine monster I put together). I don't do streaming video that requires DRM -- which will be a non-starter due to the widevine/whatever plugins being compiled against glibc.
But yeah, full Wayland desktop (well, sway) and Firefox -- no problem. I occasionally use a debian chroot to pull up gnucash (accounting program) which works as a backup but it's rare. My debian chroot is mostly to run a 10 year old printer driver from Epson that's compiled against glibc, but doing a little trickery with a small C program works just fine with CUPS still running in alpine (print filters operate on stdin and stdout, so you can launch them in a chroot by themselves no problem).
You can run gcompat and some AppImage for that DRM crap. Ditto with the CUPS driver. Not an appimage, you might be able to set up that CUPS binary with gcompat.
I've used Alpine Linux also but I found it very unintuitive for a general Linux distro (I used to like configuring things like Alpine but I've lost the spark for it and now I just want something light that works. DSL used to be like that.)
Not so much, actually. When you aim for anything that resembles modern “desktop computing” (maybe with at least some “web browsing”), you are limited to decent hardware configurations from last 15 years or so. Yes, you can show to your grand-grand-grandkids how it really was back in the days once, but you are not going to study the splash screens while programs initialize, or wait for each image to appear for a couple of seconds when skimming trough an archive, or watch page load progress bars move in the browser. But with that decent hardware, you almost always can install bog standard modern Debian with an ascetic desktop, and have much less support issues than with specialized system. It'll be the same Linux anyway.
Although it is possible that it won't work for some top performance purely 32 bit CPUs, because non 64 bit builds are certainly out of fashion today, even though some 32 bit distributions still exist.
The computer I use most of the time is a 19 year old (2005) laptop. I run Debian with LXDE and Firefox on it and, although you have to be a little bit patient with some websites, I am generally still very satisfied with it.
I suppose it's a desktop replacement model with desktop Pentium 4 and whole 2 GB of memory which cost thousands of dollars? Regular Pentium Ms of the era get dangerously close to netbook Atoms in performance, which is certainly the bottom of the barrel.
Linux From Scratch (LFS)[1] is well known but doesn't get a lot of fanfare. It was designed as a learning tool, but the avenues for exploration are endless.
I've always felt Gentoo was a decent cross between LFS and a "real" distro like Debian - much of the install is similar to LFS with some hand-holding, and the end result is a system that has package management tools.
Absolutely! I recommend Gentoo in a separate thread below.
LFS has the topic of package management covered quite nicely I think[1]. They describe the contraints and approaches that might be possible, and what the real world solutions to those are (PRM, DEB, et al).
There have even been some package managers designed (or at least discussions of what the design would look like) for LFS explicitly over the years, but none seemed to have come to fruition, and I can't find any links to them.
