this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2026
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I am collecting Linux torrents right now (discuss.online)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by sureshot0@discuss.online to c/linux@lemmy.world
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I like to have a few lightweight distros on hand because I enjoy restoring my old computers. I decided to seed these distros from the official torrents and became sort of addicted to doing it.

The most popular torrents seem to be MX Linux XFCE and Mint Ubuntu XFCE. MX Linux is at 20.2 in less than 10 days. I am wondering if there are any very small distros I haven't heard of.

Please a comment and tell me your favorite distro under 4g. I will go and try to find the torrent on their website.

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[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

How small do you want? Floppinux fits on a floppy disk.

Tiny Core's largest image will almost certainly fit on the smallest capacity USB thumb drive you own*.

Puppy Linux has a diverse ecosystem that pulls from other popular distros and their images generally run to around a gigabyte.

* It's less than 256MB. There are a few reasons you might have a smaller drive than this, but for most people this is true.

[–] sureshot0@discuss.online 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

What does Floppinux do? Why do people need it to fit on a floppy disk?

[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Admittedly, it's more of a proof of concept. I included it because it's probably the most extreme example of how small Linux can get.

It does have vi as an editor though and leaves a few kilobytes free on the same floppy, so whatever ancient hardware it runs on could be used as a very basic journaling device.

Personally, I think I might opt for FreeDOS and EDIT.COM instead, but the Linux purist would almost certainly balk at that.

[–] sureshot0@discuss.online 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I've never tried MX XFCE. It seems really popular.

I've never heard of FreeDOS. EDIT.COM doesn't link to anything, I've never heard of that.

[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

FreeDOS is a free MS-DOS compatible operating system. EDIT.COM was a commonly used editor on MS-DOS and can be run under FreeDOS. I was making a comparison with Floppinux being a bare bones OS with a basic editor (vi).

Actually, the original incarnation of EDIT.COM was as the alter ego of QBasic, so that was literally a BASIC editor, but that's more a fun fact than a selling point.