Updated with kernel 6.6, latest GCC and glibc, still under 25 MB
The first thing that struck us was the download sizes of these editions. In a world where a lightweight distro takes 2-3 GB, these are the most remarkable part. The command-line-only Core is 17.8 MB. The GUI-based TinyCore is 24 MB, and the full-fat CorePlus edition, with almost all optional extras included in the ISO, is still just 265 MB.
We tried the CorePlus edition. At a quarter of a gig, why not? VirtualBox didn't recognize the distro inside the ISO and assigned it 2 GB of RAM and 20 GB of disk. It booted in a few seconds, and left us at a desktop – there's no login screen – with 52 MB of RAM in use. Once installed, it takes 24.4 MB of disk. For comparison, we updated the installation of, on our old ThinkPad X200. This takes some 265 MB of RAM at idle – impressively low these days – and under 8 GB of disk space.
TCL is extremely minimalist in design. The whole OS is kept inside a couple of compressed files. When it boots, it uncompresses these into RAM and then runs from there, barely touching the hard disk. This is, of course, one reason for its speed. The only installation option is"Frugal mode," which writes those compressed files to a hard disk partition.Lightweight Windows-like desktop LXQt makes leap to Qt 6 with version 2.0folder.
There are penalties, such as generic graphics drivers, no easy way to update the installed system, and a mode of operation and use that's quite unlike any other FOSS Unix we've seen – but it's well worth a look. It could be handy if you need a small simple system to act as a temporary file server, or to automate some gadget, or as a web front end for something.
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