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Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop

(www.tinycorelinux.net)
518 points LorenDB | 2 comments | 06 Dec 25 14:18 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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trollbridge ◴[06 Dec 25 15:15 UTC] No.46173936[source]▶
Not to disrespect this, but it used to be entirely normal to have a GUI environment on a machine with 2MB of RAM and a 40MB disk.

Or 128K of ram and 400 kb disk for that matter.

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maccard ◴[06 Dec 25 15:26 UTC] No.46174032[source]▶
A single 1920x1080 framebuffer (which is a low resolution monitor in 2025 IMO) is 2MB. Add any compositing into the mix for multi window displays and it literally doesn’t fit in memory.
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echoangle ◴[06 Dec 25 15:40 UTC] No.46174159[source]▶
Do you really need the framebuffer in RAM? Wouldn't that be entirely in the GPU RAM?
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jerrythegerbil ◴[06 Dec 25 15:51 UTC] No.46174232[source]▶
To put it in GPU RAM, you need GPU drivers.

For example, NVIDIA GPU drivers are typically around 800M-1.5G.

That math actually goes wildly in the opposite direction for an optimization argument.

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Rohansi ◴[06 Dec 25 16:01 UTC] No.46174310[source]▶
> NVIDIA GPU drivers are typically around 800M-1.5G.

They also pack in a lot of game-specific optimizations for whatever reason. Could likely be a lot smaller without those.

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1. monocasa ◴[06 Dec 25 16:10 UTC] No.46174400[source]▶
Even the open source drivers without those hacks are massive. Each type of card has its own almost 100MB of firmware that runs on the card on Nvidia.
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2. jsheard ◴[06 Dec 25 17:15 UTC] No.46174904[source]▶
That's 100MB of RISC-V code, believe it or not, despite Nvidias ARM fixation.