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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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1. bobmcnamara ◴[06 Dec 25 16:58 UTC] No.46174766[source]▶
It's so much fun working with systems with more pixels than ram though. Manually interleaving interrupts. What joy.
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2. em3rgent0rdr ◴[07 Dec 25 13:39 UTC] No.46181605[source]▶
If you use a tile-based hardware renderer, such as on the original nintendo chip, then pixels are rendered on the fly to the screen by the hardware automatically pulling pixels based on the tile map.