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Free Lightweight Linux Distributions

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21 pointsankitsingh19 comments

Open Source Operating Systems like UNIX and Linux are a huge success despite other available options like Apple Mac OS or Windows OS. It might be obvious thing that other two major OSs are pure commercial software whereas Linux is popular because it’s available for free with great device and media supports.

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Damn Small Linux is a dead project. Really people should migrate to Tiny Core, which number five on that list.

There are other distributions which claim to be minimal; mostly for netbook users. These include things like CrunchBang or eeebuntu (if that's still its name). Some of them were decidedly not minimal.

The article fails to mention some of the oddities of these distributions; eg having to run as root.

The article fails to mention other ways to get a small installation. Distributions such as Arch are excellent here - Arch really does have a brilliant user community and documentation. Another alternative would be Linux From Scratch or Gentoo, although they would both be more effort than most people would want.

I want to echo your sentiments on Arch. I have a very lightweight Arch guest running headless through virtual box. I then use PuTTY to connect to it from my Windows host. For me, this is a much better way to have access to a *nix environment than running Cygwin.

Replace the Windows host and you have a perfect way to access a *nix environment.

Agreed on DSL. I actually used Tiny Core at work recently, and was pleasantly surprised at the ease of use and customization. Although only power-users would seek to customize it, it is certainly far easier than modifying Arch Linux or the like. It is particularly excellent for netbooting.

I personally would not refer to Mint as 'lightweight' especially. The Debian based Mint variant will be lighter than the Ubuntu based ones, and LDXE is available as the desktop, which will be light.

The others are well known light distros.

Why does this have a redundant "free" in the title?

Some Linux distributions are not free (Red Hat Enterprise Linux for instance).

Also, the free probably refers to free software - free as in beer, and not as in free beer ;)

I know some distros are not free software, but I don't know any.

I think you are mixing up free software and open source software. The vast majority of Linux distributions are not free software. See http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html. In the context of the article, I'm confident the "free" in the title refers to "free" as in "free beer".

Good point, none of the distributions presented in this article are fully free software. For example, Linux Mint comes with some non-free software media codecs, and the package managers of all these 5 distros allow you to install non-free software like Adobe Flash.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Minimal_Linux_distros

Mint is not lightweight, it's based on Ubuntu.

I came here just to say that. Linux Mint comes with so much bloat. Arch Linux and other distributions come with just the basic, and Mint is shipped with a graphical interface, lots of graphical software, media codecs, and it's huge.

I'm puzzled that Mint is on the list, which is a 1GB download and Arch Linux isn't.

Also, how about Arch Linux? It's very lightweight :)

Oh, and Gentoo. Because you build Gentoo yourself, you only choose the packages you need, so it's super lightweight, only comes with what you need.

Will going to try puppy linux.

I wish I'd seen this before I paid 500 bucks for a PAID linux distro. :-/

Oh Xandros... (http://www.xandros.com/products/downloads/downloads_eu.html - look at the prices!)

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