Dcore vs Tinycore - recap for lurkers

[PDP-8]

Only because a few new friends just didn't know the "Raison de Etre" between the two, and why I as primarily a TC user steered them towards Dcore ...

Basically, which is right for me - TC or Dcore?

Recap:
Neither is "your father's distro" as expressed by RobertS.  Both are really not designed to be run from a hard drive, although that can be done in a "frugal" manner.

Both rely mostly on ram, and unique persistence files, and not the traditional "scatter disk" layout of the more common distros.

But we know that.  Here's the difference:

TinyCore / Picore - Yes, very tiny initially.  You can start from only 11mb, and use the Tiny-X servers, like Xvesa or Xfbdev to keep things small.  OR, you can use Xorg and start to beef things up all the way to a full blown desktop.  The package repositories are user and developer contributed.  As things break, and as they have time, they *may* fix them.  Or, you may be required to do that yourself and hopefully contribute that fix back to the project.

Dcore - it *starts* using Xorg right off the bat, and relies on the Debian / Ubuntu package repos.  That implies all the software maintenance infrastructure from them to keep you on the bleeding (well stable for the most part) edge.

For a beginner, perhaps Dcore is the more appropriate choice than TC, since they are starting from Xorg right away and if they want the backing of the Debian infrastructure for packages.

You can do the same thing with Tinycore too, but it starts out very small, and for some, we stop with the tiny-x servers, and perhaps do things the old-school way, like manually editing our .Xdefaults file to configure fonts and whatnot.  Some package getting a bit stale? - request a recompile, or do it yourself and contribute it back to the community.

Thing is, TinyCore is kind of a misnomer.  At first, the thrill of seeing what one could do in only 50mb max as a self-defined limitation was the guiding principle.  But later, that restriction was changed to "start small, but make it whatever your want".

My apologies if I have gotten this wrong - but it might help the newcomer make the right choice.  Or like potato-chips, you can't have just one - try them BOTH!

[core-user]

Nice description, I had read what dCore was about, some time ago, but had forgotten the ins & outs.

I used to use CorePlus, even with the wrong resolution, on my netbooks, for online stuff, & it worked a treat.

This time though, I'm thinking of trying dCore, so need to go & re read how to set it all up.