I understand that some Linux distros are compiled with Pentium optimizations for speed to take advantage of new features that were implemented starting with the Pentium processor, and really old ones are not.
Is Tiny Core compiled without these optimizations, so that it will run on a 486? I have a *lot* of 486s.
From my experiments running TC on a thin client with 100mb, there is not a whole lot lot you can do with a lack of ram. The only webrowser you can use is links2, and you can open a few text editors and an mp3 player, and that's about that.
I'm thinking a machine with only 32mb, you're not going to be able to do much of anything in TinyCore... one app running and that's about it.
As such, Windows 95 still seems a lot more optimized for such machines... you can still run an old version of Opera on them and open some games... and on such low end machines, Tiny doesn't seem... Tiny.
The original Mac OS to me seems tiny... the whole thing ran on anywhere from 600K to 1 mb, depending on how loaded you had it with extensions. A 4mb Mac SE, I could open a ton of stuff.