Hi I really enjoy watching your guys videos and I thought I could have a go at one of these inbox questions so my question is what is the smallest Linux distro I have a really crap computer and I need a small free OS less than 500mb would be good. but it must have a GUI
Thanks
pcneard225
puppy linux
Either an LFS or Tiny Core.
thanks guys I tried tiny core and really liked it
Damn small Linux, not joking it is a distro, and it only has a 50mb footprint
dsl also has little driver support (ive never gotten it to boot fully) and dsl has an ugly ui
Vector linux is without a doubt the most full-featured and user-friendly small form factor linux for x86. It's also pretty fast, can run GIMP and other full-featured applications, etc...
Puppy linux comes in two variants: wary, which is minimal and small, and racy, which is for PC's with a little more horsepower. It's also Slackware based and a very good second choice for this kind of applications.
Everything else are more technical distros, some can be really small, and can run on systems with a little as 64 KB of RAM, like Newton for instance.
Is it 500MB of storage or 500mb of system RAM? If its RAM then try Linux mint 16 XFCE 32bit edition. with bluetooth, screensavers, printing turned off it is 124mb idle using the intel igp.
With Firefox loaded and some plugins added (like no script,ghostery) and even with a weather app and some additional tray bar apps its about 320mb measured with two tabs open (one being this site and the other a well known tech site)
the built in browser is even more lightweight although i cant validate its security credentials (other than by obscurity) but that can comfortably hold 4,5 separate tabs, all the apps and services in under 250mb.
the benefit is that you still have access to everything a fully featured windows 8 machine has (if not more including out of the box fully featured office suite, irc, vpn,graphics,media programs) and it is still fast plus you wont have to fanny around with drivers all day.
just a thought.