Side note: looking at the screenshot gallery on the linked site, it is interesting to see how often audio software GUIs mimic real, physical devices in remarkable detail. Carefully crafted graphics for volume dials, sliders etc.
Another distro worth noting here is EasyOS, a current project by Puppy Linux creator Barry Kauler: https://easyos.org/
I remember having tested it, but can't remember what it was like :) -- at least it didn't make me switch from Tiny Core Linux, which I've used extensively. From a superficial, distro-hopper view, DSL, Puppy, EasyOS and Tiny Core all feel quite similar, I guess.
As a side note, it is interesting to see DSL and TC on the HN front page in two consecutive days of 2025. Both are very old projects; I wonder what's the impulse behind this current interest.
What's the size of your "diskless" NetBSD installation, and how fast does it boot?
As compared to TC, the "out of the box" NetBSD images contain many things I wouldn't need, so customizing it has been a recurring thought, but oh well. The documentation and careful modularity is, obviously, a huge bonus of NetBSD in that regard (even an end-user like me could do some interesting modifications of the kernel solely by reading the manual). TC seems much more ad-hoc, but I assume this, too, is intentional, by design.
Around that time the NetBSD kernels with embedded rootfs filesystem I was making were around 17MB
Today, TCL is 23MB
The NetBSD kernels with embedded rootfs I'm using today are around 33MB
That size can be reduced of course
I don't monitor the boot process on RPi with serial console, I only connect after tinysshd is running, so I don't pay close attention to boot speed. It's fast enough
TCL appears to be aimed at users that prefer a binary distribution; also it provides GUI by default
I prefer to compile from source and I only use textmode hence NetBSD is more suitable for me than TCL
For someone who does not want to compile anything from source, it is possible to "customise" (replace) the rootfs of a NetBSD install image with another rootfs. It is not documented anywhere that I'm aware of but I have done it many times
I use a very minimal userland. I guarantee few if any HN readers would be satisfied with it. If I need additional programs I either (a) mount an external drive and run the programs from external storage, e.g., via chroot, or (b) copy them from an external drive into mfs or tmpfs
I like using old hardware, and Tiny Core was my daily driver for 5+ years on a Thinkpad T42 (died recently) and Dell Mini 9 (still working). I tried other distros on those machines, but eventually always came back to TC. RAM-booting makes the system fast and quiet on that 15+ years old iron, and I loved how easy it was to hand-tailor the OS - e.g. the packages loaded during boot are simply listed in a single flat file (onboot.lst).
I used both the FLTK desktop (including my all-time favorite web browser, Dillo, which was fine for most sites up to about 2018 or so) and the text-only mode. TC repos are not bad at all, but building your own TC/squashfs packages will probably become second nature over time.
I can also confirm that a handful of lenghty, long-form radio programs (a somewhat "landmark" show) for my Tiny Country's public broadcasting are produced -- and, in some cases, even recorded -- on either a Dell Mini 9 or a Thinkpad T42 and Tiny Core Linux, using the (now obsolete?) Non DAW or Reaper via Wine. It was always fun to think about this: here I am, producing/recording audio for Public Broadcasting on a 13+ year old T42 or a 10 year old Dell Mini netbook bought for 20€ and 5€ (!) respectively, whereas other folks accomplish the exact same thing with a 2000€ MacBook Pro.
It's a nice distro for weirdos and fringe "because I can" people, I guess. Well thought out. Not very far from "a Linux that fits inside a single person's head". Full respect to the devs for their quiet consistency - no "revolutionary" updates or paradigm shifts, just keeping the system working, year after year. (FLTK in 2025? Why not? It does have its charm!) This looks to be quite similar to the maintenance philosophy of the BSDs. And, next to TC, even NetBSD feels "bloated" :) -- even though it would obviously be nice to have BSD Handbook level documentation for TC; then again, the scope/goal of the two projects is maybe too different, so no big deal. The Corebook [1] is still a good overview of the system -- no idea how up-to-date it is, though.
All in all, an interesting distro that may "grow on you".
See also: PDOS (Public Domain Operating System) https://www.pdos.org/ -- a single-person project with a remarkably stream-of-concsiousness-style webpage. Not sure how well 'geniuine' DOS software works on this system, though.
+1. I set up Fedora, openSUSE and later Arch for our son (then 10-11yo). He became instantly curious about typing those strange words in terminal (unix heritage all the way :), started to check internet availability with 'ping' by himself, etc.
Unfortunately, the laptop has a Nvidia GPU, which conflicted with some of his games, and the gaming experience was all in all not very smooth. Eventually I gave up and went with Windows 10 LTSC -- surprisingly usable and bullshit-free (!), but, well, I don't think he has ever touched the terminal in this Windows system. I'd say after switching to Windows, his progress in Actually Learning Stuff About Computers has more or less stalled. It's mostly mindless gaming and Youtube these days (luckily, he's interested in sports exercises, athletes etc - so there's at least some "real-world related" information included).
Contemporary Linux can be quite confusing, but it is still miles ahead of Windows in encouraging the child's hands-on experience and exploration of the system. The GUI inconsistencies of current Windows are simply horrible IMO; back in the Win2k/XP days, it was actually quite a usable -- and, hackable! -- system; these days it's just an insanely huge, impossible-to-grasp mess. Also, I have yet to find a simple, easily understandable and modifiable solution for setting daily computer time restrictions for our son on Windows -- surprisingly, while there are a gazillion of small single-purpose apps in the Windows world, there doesn't appear to be too many options for parental control if you wish to avoid a Windows account altogether.
Ha, I just recently had uBlock Origin remove all HTML elements on news sites that 1) link to comments (in my country this is usually in the form of comment count right after the headline - and typically the comments are printed in red, ugh), and 2) allow me to comment (usually a button at the end of the article).
News comments in my country have really become almost completely pointless. It's ridiculous or even incredible - honestly, you have something like 1 sensible comment out of 30 or 40. Things started to go noticeably downhill during Covid, and it got worse with the war in Ukraine (we are battling Russian trolls over here). In this light, the uBock Origin solution has really worked wonders for me. Having also removed some other "cruft" like content marketing stories etc, I can read news in a calm, peaceful atmosphere again. Not thinking about commenters (dubbed "commentariat" by a witty local intellectual - scornfully hinting to "proletariat", obviously) or commenting at all.
Thought about Non immediately, but I figured it must have (had) about 2 other users amongst HNers, though. :) Nice to see it mentioned.
I used it quite a bit to produce radio shows for my country's public broadcasting. Because Non's line-oriented session format was so easy to parse with classic Unix tools, I wrote a bunch of scripts for it with Awk etc. (E.g. calculating the total length of clips highlighted with brown color in the DAW -- which was stuff meant for editing out; or creating a poor man's "ripple editing" feature by moving loosely-placed clips precisely side by side; or, eventually, converting the sessions to Samplitude EDL format, and, from there, to Pro Tools via AATranslator [1] (because our studio was using PT), etc. Really fun times!)
The https://udm14.com/ flavor of Google is quite usable, though, esp with notable operators like inurl:this-or-that. But, all in all, yeah, gimme back vanilla Google search from 2008-2010 or so. Back then it was definitely a tool (I worked in investigative journalism at the time), whereas currently "searching" stands for sitting fingers crossed and hoping for the better. But, oh well. </rant>
I literally remember one of my elderly relatives pulling out a tooth at home with a thread tied around a door handle as if this was nothing special. DIY all the way! Early 1990s, former Soviet Union rural-or-so area.
As of today, we have moved to a different situation where dental care in that same country is ample, but the price lists are rarely transparent, making many not-so-well-off people avoid going to dentists altogether.
The health insurance system gives something like 60€ yearly to an adult for fixing teeth. Dental care for children up to 19yo is for free, though, which is great.
>I literally remember one of my elderly relatives pulling out a tooth at home with a thread tied around a door handle as if this was nothing special. DIY all the way! Early 1990s, former Soviet Union rural-or-so area.
Some form of this type of tooth pulling was common for baby teeth in the 90s. I’m sure it still is today. I don’t know about recommending it for adult teeth.
Yeah my kid asked me to do some form of this for a baby tooth because She didn’t want to wait for an appointment and it was really bothering her. It worked! Definitely not recommended for an adult tooth. Baby teeth are barely hanging on and don’t have deep roots really
