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

http://www.tinycorelinux.net/

80•LorenDB•1h ago

Comments

bflesch•58m ago

Looks really nice, I like the idea.

But can they please empower a user interface designer to simply improve the margins and paddings of their interface? With a bunch of small improvements it would look significantly better. Just fix the spacing between buttons and borders and other UI elements.

grim_io•53m ago

One could argue that visible borders are a feature, not a bug.

If you are trying to maximize for accessibility, that is.

egormakarov•39m ago

Pretty sure it was not about presence of visible borders, but about missing spacing between borders and buttons. That on some screenshots, but not others. It's not like this ui has some high-density philosophy, it's just very inconsistent

bflesch•28m ago

It's not about the damn borders it is about the spacing between the buttons and other UI elements as you can see in the screenshot. I don't want them to introduce some shitty modern design, just fix the spacing so it doesn't immediately jump out as odd and unpolished.

wild_egg•49m ago

Modern UX trends are a scourge of excessive whitespace and low information density that get in the way of actually accomplishing tasks.

Any project that rejects those trends gets bonus points in my book.

Perz1val•31m ago

Look at screenshots -> wallpaper window. The spacing between elements is all over the place and it simply looks like shit. Seeing this I'm having doubts if the team who did this is competent at all

bflesch•25m ago

Exactly.

I know that not everybody spent 10 years fiddling with CSS so I can understand why a project might have a skill gap with regards to aesthetics. I'm not trying to judge their overall competence, just wanted to say that there are so many quick wins in the design it hurts me a bit to see it. And due to nature of open source projects I was talking about "empowering" a designer to improve it because oftentimes you submit a PR for aesthetic improvements and then notice that the project leaders don't care about these things, which is sad.

bflesch•27m ago

If you look at the screenshots it immediately jumps out that it is unpolished: the spacings are all over the place, the window maximize/minimize/close buttons have different widths and weird margins.

I thought that would be immediately clear to the HN crowd but I might have overestimated your aesthetic senses.

shiftpgdn•56m ago

This is cool. My first into to a practical application of Linux in the early 2000s was using Damn Small Linux to recover files off of cooked Windows Machines. I looked up the project the other day while reminiscing and thought it would be interesting if someone took a real shot at reviving the spirit of the project.

hypeatei•54m ago

The site doesn't have HTTPS and there doesn't seem to be any signatures on the downloads page. Any way to check it hasn't been MITM'd?

firesteelrain•48m ago

Not foolproof. Could compute MD5 or SHA256 after downloading.

hypeatei•38m ago

And compare it against what?

EDIT: nevermind, I see that it has the md5 in a text file here: http://www.tinycorelinux.net/16.x/x86/release/

maccard•34m ago

Which is served from the same insecure domain. If the download is compromised you should assume the hash from here is too.

hypeatei•31m ago

An integrity check is better than nothing, but yes it says nothing about its authenticity.

embedding-shape•23m ago

An integrity check where both what you're checking and the hash you're checking against is literally not better than nothing if you're trying to prevent downloading compromised software. It'd flag corrupted downloads at least, so that's cool, but for security purposes the hash for a artifact has to be served OOB.

firesteelrain•21m ago

You can use this site

https://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/downloads.html

And all the files are here

https://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/16.x/x86/release/

Under a HTTPS connection. I am not at a terminal to check the cert with OpenSSL.

I don’t see any way to check the hash OOB

Also this same thing came up a few years ago

https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/reli...

firesteelrain•15m ago

There is a secure domain to download from as a mirror. For extra high security, the hash should be delivered OOB like on a mailing list but it isn’t

lysace•48m ago

Ideas to decrease risk of MITM:

Download from at least one more location (like some AWS/GCP instance) and checksum.

Download from the Internet Archive and checksum:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/http://www.tinyc...

Y_Y•45m ago

https://github.com/tinycorelinux

trollbridge•46m ago

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.

Perz1val•41m ago

Yea, but those platforms were not 64bit

maccard•35m ago

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.

echoangle•21m ago

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

znpy•14m ago

Aren’t you cheating by having additional ram dedicated for gpu use exclusively? :)

sigwinch•12m ago

VGA standard supports up to 256k

jerrythegerbil•11m ago

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.

embedding-shape•24m ago

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

Or 32K of RAM and 64KB disk for that matter.

What's your point? That the industry and what's commonly available gets bigger?

forinti•6m ago

The Acorn Archimedes had the whole OS on a 512KB ROM.

That said, OSs came with a lot less stuff then.

1vuio0pswjnm7•3m ago

I would like to have this again

I prefer to use additional RAM and disk for data not code

deadbabe•40m ago

If you use Linux, why use a graphical desktop? It invites vanity, and a lot of time wasted configuring graphics. Dulls the mind, promotes click and dragging. Just use a terminal setup and open applications as needed, maybe a tiling window manager.

lp0_on_fire•37m ago

Why use a terminal when you can use punch cards?

Y_Y•31m ago

Because this is now a paperless office, please consider the enviroment

adrianN•22m ago

Switching away from clay tablets was a step in the wrong direction.

jqpabc123•31m ago

Why use a computer when you can use a slide rule?

veganjay•37m ago

I have an older laptop with a 32-bit processor and found that TinyCoreLinux runs well on it. It has its own package manager that was easy to learn. This distro can be handy in these niche situations.

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

HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers

Linux Instal Fest Belgrade

Self-hosting my photos with Immich

A compact camera built using an optical mouse

Mapping Amazing: Bee Maps

Touching the Elephant – TPUs

The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude

Wolfram Compute Services

Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

The Absent Silence (2010)

How I discovered a hidden microphone on a Chinese NanoKVM

Schizophrenia sufferer mistakes smart fridge ad for psychotic episode

PalmOS on FisherPrice Pixter Toy

Gemini 3 Pro: the frontier of vision AI

Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros

Have I been Flocked? – Check if your license plate is being watched

Leaving Intel

Divine D native Linux open-source mobile system – Rev. 1.1 Hardware Architecture

Making tiny 0.1cc two stroke engine from scratch

Kids who ran away to 1960s San Francisco

Infracost (YC W21) is hiring Sr Node Eng to make $600B/yr cloud spend proactive

Netflix’s AV1 Journey: From Android to TVs and Beyond

Frinkiac – 3M "The Simpsons" Screencaps

Patterns for Defensive Programming in Rust

Idempotency keys for exactly-once processing

Why Speed Matters

The missing standard library for multithreading in JavaScript

I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA

Adenosine on the common path of rapid antidepressant action: The coffee paradox

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

Comments

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

HTML as an Accessible Format for Papers

Linux Instal Fest Belgrade

Self-hosting my photos with Immich

A compact camera built using an optical mouse

Mapping Amazing: Bee Maps

Touching the Elephant – TPUs

The unexpected effectiveness of one-shot decompilation with Claude

Wolfram Compute Services

Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025

The Absent Silence (2010)

How I discovered a hidden microphone on a Chinese NanoKVM

Schizophrenia sufferer mistakes smart fridge ad for psychotic episode

PalmOS on FisherPrice Pixter Toy

Gemini 3 Pro: the frontier of vision AI

Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros

Have I been Flocked? – Check if your license plate is being watched

Leaving Intel

Divine D native Linux open-source mobile system – Rev. 1.1 Hardware Architecture

Making tiny 0.1cc two stroke engine from scratch

Kids who ran away to 1960s San Francisco

Infracost (YC W21) is hiring Sr Node Eng to make $600B/yr cloud spend proactive

Netflix’s AV1 Journey: From Android to TVs and Beyond

Frinkiac – 3M "The Simpsons" Screencaps

Patterns for Defensive Programming in Rust

Idempotency keys for exactly-once processing

Why Speed Matters

The missing standard library for multithreading in JavaScript

I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA

Adenosine on the common path of rapid antidepressant action: The coffee paradox