I’ve been doing some scouring and my search results are coming back confusing. Usually either incomplete information, or some kind of sales spam, so I’m reaching out in the hopes of recommendations for actual linux users and fans. I am looking for a very small, tiny even, security/privacy focused distro. I don’t mind doing some work to set it up (though LFS may kill me!)

Here is what I have.

  • RAM: 2GB (yep. Seriously. None-upgradable).
  • HDD: 20GB (say 19GB)
  • Processor: Intel Celeron N3350 (2334Mhz average)
  • GPU (hah): Intel HD Graphics 500 (Integrated)

Wishlist

  • Graphical user interface (I appreciate it’s going to be very basic)
  • Arch based (I love the AUR and pacman)
  • Base runs on less than 512MB of RAM, Arch Linux is a minimum of 512MB.

The software I plan to run on said device, so to give some kind of guidance of how much RAM we’re working with.

  • Tor Expert and Tor Browser bundles or Mull.
  • Virtual machine (of some kind) with Whonix
  • MariaDB
  • RClone
  • VLC/Smplayer (which ever is smaller)
  • VPN client
  • Rustdesk (I can’t find anything smaller than actually works)
  • ZSnes
  • SimpleX
  • Deluge (DelugeD with thin-client)
  • LibreOffice (until I can find a lighter alternative, but I need the BASIC capabilities).
  • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago
    • Use Arch as the Linux distro. Take advantage of its custom install to reduce the initial footprint.
    • Use a lightweight desktop environment. An extreme example would be starting up OpenBox from startx but there are some others like LxQt that might work.
    • AbiWord/Gnumeric are still alive and you can use them instead of LibreOffice.
    • You can use Mplayer from CLI as video player.
    • Use Transmission or rtorrent instead of Deluge, they take up much less RAM.
    • You can use X2Go instead of RustDesk, it forwards X over SSH; but it doesn’t have NAT traversal. Or you can use Tailscale for NAT traversal, which takes care of encryption too, and then you can use plain VNC for desktop viewing.
    • Some of the stuff you listed are notorious RAM hogs, like VM, most relational databases, browsers. Good luck with that.