Unfortunately, the flip phone route for doing daily calls/texts won’t work because I use multiple phone numbers, and those phones have proprietary operating systems/firmware. Though, I still keep one in a Faraday bag if needed for emergencies.
With 32MB of RAM you can’t go far. The Linux kernel barely runs on it, and that’s just the kernel. NetBSD also has a minimum requirement of 32GB of RAM. One other thing you can do is try to run BeOS (not Haiku, but BeOS). It could run on 32MB of RAM (it still preferred 64 MB, but it could run on 32 too).
rnote is really slick. Haven’t used it thoroughly, though. The default recommendation is xournal++,which is a bit more old-school, but still very good.
There was a gpl licensed browser engine someone by hobby is writing from scratch. I think theese companies supporting ladybird just do so because of license that they can proprietarify(like chromium)
There was a gpl licensed browser engine someone by hobby is writing from scratch. I think theese companies supporting ladybird just do so because of license that they can proprietarify(like chromium)
Suspend resume is the main one. Power management may be another. For example USB ports could be turned off, the CPU scheduler could be changed to powersave, network speed reduced, and a lot more These are always different though and 90% fine.
Fedora Atomic Desktops are great here. The goal is a minimal base OS for running Flatpak apps (or container stuff) on. They are a bit too minimal for me poorly, uBlue uses these desktops and adds more packages, most notably hardware support (like asus, nvidia, surface)
Android is extremely different from traditional distros.
It uses A/B-root with 2 immutable system partitions, where the system apps are. That storage space can only be used by the system so uninstalling stuff there doesnt do anything useful, if you dont also install system apps there. Which is not normally possible.
On Android, a minimal system like on GrapheneOS is best. All other editions, Googles own PixelOS included, break the Android security model of sandboxing all apps, which is hillarious. Only GrapheneOS really follows it by also sandboxing the optional Google apps and services.
On traditional Linux distros, the system is just a bunch of packages slammed onto a disk, and a package manager doesnt know how the setup should look like. It only knows that package A also requires packages B, C, X, 1, 2 and there are often package groups like kde-plasma-desktop that automatically install packages D, E, F, G for example.
Uninstalling an app may remove dependencies, and if the app is not a dependency of others, it works without issues.
This is only system packages. With Flatpaks, Snaps, Appimages or binaries (like the Firefox .tar.gz archive Mozilla officially offers) you can install and uninstall whatever you want.
On “immutable” distros, that use many different variants of reducing the mess of traditional distros, this is different. On Fedora Atomic Desktops, which (maybe apart from NixOS, which is more complicated) use the best method of this composed system, you can rpm-ostree override remove a package and it is removed from the “immutable” system. But there are no immutable distros I think, all allow changes by root users.
Root on Android is different than on Linux. You can use Linux without root, but distros are not built for that. I am working on making Fedora capable of that, even though my change for flatpaks was rejected poorly.
On Linux by default you are a wheel/sudo user and can run commands with root privileges by just entering your user password. Thus, the barrier for programs to get root access is pretty low, and you should always try to make your system update on its own, and have a user not in the wheel (most distros) / sudo (debian) group.
No, rooting on Android is very very different. On Linux you have root access and can control this with sudo configuration, polkit rules and user groups.
You can create custom groups like “the flatpak group is allowed to install apps of this specific format, even though it might normally require root access”.
Package managers have package groups, most distros have groups for an entire DE. Just install one package group and install another.
On Fedora Atomic desktops, the system is composed into “images”, more like Android. The system is separate from the user stuff (your home directory, user configurations) and you can swap to a different image by “rebasing”.
This is way more stable than the oldschool package manager way. For example you can rebase from silverblue (GNOME) to kinoite (KDE Plasma).
Wayland is a modern and sleek protocol for apps to display stuff on the screen, read stuff from the screen, capture input (like keyboard, camera, audio) and more. It handles access of apps to what you allow it, and it fundamentally more clean and controlled than X11, which is the old display protocol.
For example, X11 allows any app, no matter if in the foreground or not even displaying a window, to log all your keyboard inputs, all the time.
Docker is a tool to use small “containers”, which is a set of files that build an operating system. The files are the ones you normally find as the system stuff of an OS, but in a reduced form, and without the kernel (the main hardware interface and controller). Containers run on your system kernel, but in a different “system”. If you run apps there, they run in the container and not on your system. This ensures that apps compatible with that container run on all systems, that support running the container manager (podman or docker).
Podman is an alternative to docker that is supposedly more secure.
Containers are used by lazy devs to not need to fiddle with all the different Linux system configuations anymore. They help to get new software more easily and faster updates. Flatpak also uses containers.
But they are also bigger, use more RAM (it is a small extra system!) and are outside of the control of the OS. Updates also work strange, containers are images that are never updated from inside it (like a traditional distro) but as a whole by the container manager.
This means they may be outdated or insecure. There are tools to update containers and to check for CVEs (critical vulnerabilities) in them.
As a desktop user, you should normally not need to use containers. Their UX (user experience) kinda suck and they are not a good way to get apps.
Distrobox is a small exception. It uses podman or docker under the hood, and allows to install containers of other Linux Distros on a different Distro. For example if an app only runs on Ubuntu, you can use it on Fedora anyways.
On Fedora Atomic Desktops, Distrobox helps to install some apps that are not yet flatpaks. But the user experience is still worse, for example system upgrades dont work and you need to replace the container and reinstall the apps when upgrading it.
Using a rolling distro container like Arch, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, Debian Sid, OpenSUSE Slowroll, helps here. But apart from OpenSUSE Slowroll I wouldnt use them.
As others have suggested, the only option I can think of is Tinycore but you’ll need to get the Microcore version (aka Core ISO with no GUI). This should run on 32MB RAM but leaves you very little headroom with a very barebones install, and obviously no GUI of any kind. [Source]
I looked up the Compaq Armada 1700 and saw that it came with 32MB soldered with one slot available to expand up to 160MB. It’s a long shot, but if you can find a working 32MB, 64MB or 128MB memory module for this you should be able to run TinyCore with a GUI. Adding more RAM would also open up options like Slackware.
It’s not clear to me if Debian will work or not, even with maxing out the RAM in this computer. There is a low memory install mode you could try but I think even that requires at least 256MB which is beyond the theoretical maximum this computer supports.
If all you want to do is prove to yourself that you can install Linux on this computer then Microcore might be worth a try. If you want a usable system with a GUI then you’re probably going to have to add more RAM.
This could be a long shot, but so long as you do NOT connect it to the internet, you could try sourcing a Linux distribution from back when this computer was released, I’m thinking Redhat Linux (before RHEL and Fedora was a thing) or Debian a very old version of Debian. However even if you do succeed in this it’s probably not going to be usable.
I don’t know if it’s a good idea to build a new engine from scratch… Maybe it is but I don’t know, behind an engine you need to have support and development, so this thing needs to be improved and supported along the versions to be safe, so I don’t know if it’s a good idea or not 🙃
I’m sorry but I think that’s just the way Java Edition goes mate, lol.
You see a modpack that recommends 6GB allocated and you think “oh, I’m fine, I have 16”, next thing you know you’re almost going OOM.
I have recently upgraded to 32GB solely because of ‘All The Mods 9’
Maybe Logseq? It also has a whiteboard function for drawing diagrams and stuff.
The last time I tried it, it wasn’t Logseqs’ flag ship feature for sure, but as an addition to an already great note taking software, it was good.
It is not like 'very limited'. But generally they are focused around modern Intel CPU, and can have issues on new AMD CPU. And it won't work on very old CPUs without proper virtualization features.
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