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Comment by haunter | Hacker News Reader

And you can go even smaller with TinyCore Linux [0] or the xwoaf-rebuild [1]

1, https://web.archive.org/web/20240901115514/https://pupngo.dk...

Honestly it comes down to what do you mean by using Linux. In 2026, or well at least since the mid 2010s, the biggest hurdle will be the web browser. Do you need that? If yes then you are already in the higher system requirement pool. If not then pretty much anything goes, like the options I mentioned above. And even then you can use curl, wget, aria2 etc to access online content to some extent

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> And you can go even smaller with TinyCore Linux or the xwoaf-rebuil

Sure, but in this time and age, do they really have to settle for such extreme 90s looks as defaults? I mean, Windows XP Media Center Edition can surely be considered as "lightweight" today and it featured the gorgeous Royale theme back in 2005.

Yeah, this is what always surprises me with modern software targeted towards low-specced computers.

Windows XP run fine in 256MB ram computers yet it could be altered to make it look fantastic, with the Royale or Royale Noir themes.

I guess even Linux back then could be made beautiful on similarly specced computers. Yet, AntiX or even LxQt is hideous despite consuming more resources!

I wonder where all the artists who used to make the wide range of styles for XP went after MS made it harder to apply themes to windows, or what factors contributed to attracting artists to start making that kind of customization. I think partially it's down to the platform many use (many seek to theme mobile OSes), but the tools to do so has to be a large contribution. I'm not aware of anything like Stardock's Skin studio that exists outside windows, and from looking at their website it's now useless for anything past win10 1909. Having their art seen on widely used platforms (OS or applications) has to be a large draw to it as well.

Obviously, CSS designers.

Otter Browser it's uber light, but for proper support you might need to build it against the qtwebkit/qtwebengine plugin (I can't remember, but one of the two engines was the most modern one). If not, I have Dillo+MPV+ytdlp/streamlink for video sites. More than often if you works. Also, I have gemini://gemi.dev (Dillo plugin) for the news sites tunneled over Gemini and some nice Gopher sites such gopher://magical.fish and gopher://sdf.org

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