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

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

UI and UX Design

  • Several commenters criticize the desktop’s visual polish: inconsistent spacing, uneven button sizes, and awkward margins that make it look “off” or amateurish despite otherwise appealing simplicity.
  • Others defend high information density and visible borders, pushing back against “modern” UIs with huge whitespace and low density.
  • A middle position emerges: retro/90s-style is fine, but Tiny Core’s GUI lacks the fit-and-finish of classic systems like Mac OS 7–9, Windows 95, OS/2, or BeOS.
  • There’s frustration that open source projects often don’t “empower” designers; aesthetic PRs may be undervalued even though they’d be quick wins.

Security, HTTPS, and Integrity

  • Strong criticism that the main site is HTTP-only and ships ISOs and hashes over insecure channels, making MITM trivial.
  • Some note a HTTPS ibiblio mirror, but point out that if links to it come from HTTP, that’s still weak.
  • Debate over hashes served from the same insecure location:
    • One side: useful only for corruption detection, not security; can even be harmful if people trust them.
    • Other side: still “better than nothing” and helpful for post-incident analysis.
  • Consensus from security-minded participants: proper GPG signatures plus keys or hashes distributed via HTTPS or another out-of-band channel are the modern baseline.

Use Cases and Target Hardware

  • Popular for reviving old or 32‑bit machines (Pentium III, 486, old ThinkPads, netbooks) and for extremely low-resource scenarios.
  • Widely used as a rescue/live system: partition repair, password resets, file recovery from broken Windows installs, CNC controller hosts, and dedicated appliances (e.g., Pico‑8 boxes, writer decks, audio production).
  • piCore (Raspberry Pi version) and Alpine-on-Pi are highlighted for RAM-boot setups that almost eliminate SD card wear, ideal for long-lived “cron slave” or small server roles.

Comparisons and Alternatives

  • Frequent comparisons to Damn Small Linux (including its recent revival), Puppy, Slax, SliTaz, Alpine, QNX demo disk, MicroLinux, xwoaf, NetBSD/SmolBSD, Haiku, and FreeDOS.
  • Many reminisce about fully functional GUIs on machines with a few megabytes of RAM; Tiny Core is seen as continuing that lineage.

Architecture and Features

  • Key design points called out: runs from RAM, tarball-based packages mounted via FUSE, can also run in a “mount mode” from disk, and dCore variant reuses Debian’s large package ecosystem.
  • Praised as an example of how far you can get by aggressively optimizing for size and simplicity, though some see signs of an aging/“good enough” project (old-style site, no HTTPS, sparse polish).