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

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.

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.

Do you really need the framebuffer in RAM? Wouldn't that be entirely in the GPU RAM?

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.

Doesn't the UEFI firmware map a GPU framebuffer into the main address space "for free" so you can easily poke raw pixels over the bus? Then again the UEFI FB is only single-buffered, so if you rely on that in lieu of full-fat GPU drivers then you'd probably want to layer some CPU framebuffers on top anyway.