++++
3/17/2023
  ++++

I had previously reviewed Puppy Linux [1]. Today, in my quest for
holy and beautiful minimalism I will be writing about Tiny Core
Linux.  

In my previous exploration of the Puppy-verse I had noted that 
it was not quite my flavor of minimalism.  To try to find a 
different way to express this, Puppy is about trying to fit as 
much as possible in its memory space, with the added parameter 
of what can "reasonably" be loaded into RAM [2].  

Tiny Core takes a different view of minimalism, one closer to my
design sense: start with how little you need, and then you build
up from there...  The guy who wrote The Little Prince said 
something to the effect of "perfection is not when there is 
nothing left to add, but rather nothing left to take away." Well, 
Tiny Core has taken it all away.

There is a 16 MB version for people who really know what they 
are doing -- this is sometimes affectionately called Micro Core 
-- but as I am just a dude on Spring Break looking for a decent-
sized project to tinker with, I treated myself to the luxurious
164.6 MB Tiny Core Plus.  Now compare this 164.6 MB to the Bionic 
Pup I played with at 371 MB, and Zorin "Lite"'s absurd 2.6 GB, which 
is somehow more than Mint's 2.3 GB! That seems to be a crime.

Even going big as I did with Tiny Core Plus, there is so little 
you can do that you are briefly in that idealized world where 
there is only one way to do something,and that way is clunky work 
with windows that look like something out of Window's 95 -- which 
in this context I found charming [3]. 

Update. I was actually a little more annoyed with clunky windows 
to do everything than I stated. Or maybe it is that the charm 
wore off. But playing around again with TC I found that I could
also toggle around apps, or even get them to open in the first 
place by holding alt+tab, which then opens a menu which can be 
navigated with the arrow keys. Still not as nice of a binding for
me as GNOME terminals alt+number of tab I want, but better than 
using a mouse. 

+++

I did indeed pick a project of the right size for the amount of
time I had to play around with it.  With the first USB stick I 
had to tinker a bit to get the files I made, and eventually 
Firefox, persist.  This is basically a frugal installation, 
where the USB holds the core, but a hardrive gets mounted and 
the extra stuff gets saved.  With a second USB stick, I used the 
installer program which comes with Tiny Core and made it so files
and programs that I add save to the USB, a live disk that loads 
into RAM, leaving nothing behind when the session is over. This 
one comes in at little under 300 MB, leaving over 15 GB to grow
into even with the cheapest USB stick I could get at Walmart. 

I left my live USB to be my safe search stick, and then tricked 
out -- in my fashion -- the frugal install.  It has Nano, Aspell,
and Lynx, so I can word process, spell check, and look up quick 
facts while still in terminal respectively.  

This set up worked well for the quiet of the night after our 
daughter was put off in her crib -- which she has taken to well,
thankfully.  There are other times I might write that call for 
music.  During those times, I have a few other computers in my 
collection that will do.  

But for the times when the day has been long and having anything 
else available would only serve as temptation or distraction, 
this is the truly perfect set up. 

+++

[1] Puppy Linux is technically a grouping of distros around a 
similar philosophy and using similar tools. 

[2] There is an additional criteria that Puppy in practice uses 
to pick what to cram in: stuff that would have been appreciated 
in the Golden Age of Windows. Old people really should use it to 
keep their old machines running... But good luck convincing them.

[3] Less charming is the lack of "man" being loaded... yup, 
even man files are left out to make this Core even tinier.

That's how hardcore these people are. 

--

This work is hereby in the public domain. 
Do what you want with it.