Comment by apatters | Hacker News Reader

Comment by apatters | Hacker News Reader

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Yep that's a great point, maybe they are not communicating what the unique benefits of Lubuntu will be in the future, or maybe they don't actually know what they'll be.

Right now Lubuntu's niche is really clear for me, if I want a lightweight, general purpose distro I use Xubuntu. If I want a really lightweight, general purpose distro I use Lubuntu. (A step beyond that if I wanted "so damn light there are probably a lot of things I don't be able to do, I would think of Puppy or Damn Small or something, neither of which I've needed to touch in a long time, not sure they're even still maintained.)

So if Lubuntu is no longer my super-light distro, erm, what is it. A competitor to Xubuntu?

(Total side note, I really love the space of light, clean, functional desktop operating systems. The most exciting development in computing for me personally would be if someone figured out how to commercialize one as a competitor to Windows and Mac. If I thought there was a good business model I'd start that company myself.)

In my experience such "lightweight" distros, over time, accumulate expanded functionality/compatibility/surface area and inevitably/gradually become "heavier".

Then the community complains "X" is too heavy, we need a lightweight system! and the cycle repeats itself.

Which is why ArchLinux is so nice that it doesn't suffer from this type of growth by nature of its design. You can very easily layer lightweight frontends on a very reliable core.

Putting Arch and reliable in vicinity to each other is stretching it a little.

I think it's becoming the Qt (via LXQt) competitor to the GTK3 (via Xfce) Xubuntu.

Re: Puppy and Damn Small: the former's still maintained, while the latter (last I checked) is not.

Another one to add to your list of tiny Linux distros is Tiny Core Linux, which is indeed tiny while being fully graphical.

Great to hear Puppy is still being developed. I'm downloading it now!

I see Puppy's shifted their idea of "lightweight" too, I recall the ISO being 4-5x smaller last time (2007ish).

In my opinion, if you like tiny distros (as do I), you might want to look at Alpine Linux. It has a good number of up to date packages and has a very tiny footprint. The installation process could use some help to improve adoption, but it is otherwise a fun and tiny distribution of Linux.

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