what KEEP your interest with tinycore?

[mocore]

 its minimalism invites quizzical scrutability !

[core-user]

Fascination.....why can TC do what it does, but other distros need to add so much more than is necessary.....

No, I don't use it daily, but nearly always have a copy around.....I love that it uses so little resources, & that it itself is only a few MBs.

I have come to hate bloated distros, with everything but the kitchen sink included - I use small distros, for all my daily needs.

Re hardware, I now only use pre used ultra small form factor computers, (& thin clients), however, I do own a RPi4 & a RPi400, my most up to date systems.

[Rich]

Hi core-user

Fascination.....why can TC do what it does, but other distros need to add so much more than is necessary..... ...

That's easy. Those "other distros" are meant to satisfy the needs and
desires of the widest audience possible without the need to learn too
much about Linux. In order to meet that goal, what they add really
is necessary.

With Tinycore, it's the end users responsibility to learn how it works
so they can mold it to fit their needs.

[mocore]

wrt "other distros"
> satisfy the ... widest audience possible without the need to learn too much about Linux.

conversely i find

the more you learn about other distros (components config/defaults assumptions ect)
the more you appreciate less components config/defaults assumptions!

[thane]

For years my personal computers were Windows boxes, although I had some familiarity with Linux-like operating systems from AIX boxes at work. I belatedly realized that 95% of my personal computer use was web surfing and email, and who needs a jillion apps for that? This led me to start looking around at various Linux apps to run on a box or two I'd salvaged from dumpsters (literally). The first Linux distro I tried was Puppy, and it was very satisfying to get that to work. However I didn't like being locked into other people's notions of what apps I would need. I discovered Tiny Core IIRC in 2010 and it was just what I wanted. Admittedly it had a couple of quirks on the hardware I was using that might have put me off if it had it been the first Linux distro I tried. I worked through that and have used Tiny Core almost daily ever since.

I still have a Windows box for when I need something more conventional, but I'm generally only on it a couple of times a month.

[gadget42]

...salvaged from dumpsters...

kudos from a fellow extreme recycler/repurposer/reuser!

[Leee]

...salvaged from dumpsters...

kudos from a fellow extreme recycler/repurposer/reuser!

I try to get to them just -before- they actually go into the dumpster but, as they say, "beggars can't be choosers".     

[gadget42]

I try to get to them just -before- they actually go into the dumpster ...

yes, it is much better to get them in a "known-good" condition. you never know what you're going to get with abandoned equipment. also it is wise to have permission to salvage from dumpster.

[jazzbiker]

No automount.

[nick65go]

maybe: curiosity, perseverance, hope, desire to share something

[Leee]

What KEEP your interest with tinycore?   Well...

• pretty much everything on the "Welcome" page
• pretty much everything on the "Intro" page
• pretty much everything on the "Core Concepts" page

but the real kicker is

• pretty much everything on the "Forums" page

which is to say the exchange of ideas and assistance among everyone on the Tiny Core team and in the user community in general.

[GNUser]

I've found that unexpected behaviors in a TCL system are always either my own fault (e.g., an error in my configuration file) or due to an upstream bug. This is in contrast to other distros I've used, where it was often the case that the distro itself turned out to be the culprit (e.g., two preinstalled daemons trying to do the same job).

So any time I have a problem on TCL, I start by educating myself about the application. If I'm still having problems after clearing myself from suspicion, I can safely skip over distro-level issues and start scrutinizing the application's source code and bug tracker.

[NewUser]

I had played with random Linux distros since RedHat 5.1. Later I was in a position to wipe drives, a lot of drives. I ended up with Parted Magic, but found Tiny Core, which has a Secure Erase extension. I could not make TinyCore's Secure Erase work, probably because I didn't know about dbus or acpid. But I stuck with TinyCore. Don't run it often, but regularly.

[gadget42]

...I could not make TinyCore's Secure Erase work...

using a forum search for "secure-erase.tcz" we found this from circa 2020:
https://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,23578.msg147771.html#msg147771
("dependency Xdialog.tcz not found for secure-erase.tcz")

although upon further recollection, parted magic usually shows the drive(s) to be frozen and further allows for a _suspend_and_resume_ to attempt to "un-freeze" them...ymmv

20240213-0440am-cst-usa-modified-added additional note regarding frozen/unfrozen drives(since this functionality probably wasn't available or apparent in previous failed attempts)

[Dies Irae]

For me, i'm genuinely to dumb for anything else

Seriously though, I was used to running disk less (W2K) since very early 2000, since the ntldr from w2k3 was not crippled and i could pxe-boot that.. Coupled with sandboxie (for which i have a now worthless unlimited lifetime licence) that served as my easy application virtualization, I couldn't possibly be more happy long into 2015.
Drivers started to become an issue, and corresponding hardware upgrades.

The best tip in linux I ever had was this: "almost all distro's are just a skinned copy of some upstream distro. A decent upstream distro has a specific purpose (or is pointless). Figure out what you want, find matching distro."

Ok, so want tiny tiny tiny, and I quite literally asked: "gimme io.sys and command.com".

The website and the book into the core, were thusly a joy to read, as they managed to very quickly convey that tinycore would work exactly the way i'd like it: the so called "cloud os".

It's somewhat sad, that in reality, it seems there is not much help/support for the main purpose, and more support (seemingly) for more 'traditional' setups.

I've been a daily driver, with very minor cheating using vnc+vps as remote desktop. Clocked 800 days uptime with tc10.1 on a 2.8 single core celeron (from early 2000) with 512M shared. (hint, httpmounting stuff gives you access as if it was on your local (ram-)drive, but cost just some KB for fuse and httpmount tool, and as plenty of research has shown in the past years, things like mozilla have shown that download fresh is FASTER than browser cache...)

I've been working diligently to achieve the dream: be able to travel abroad, buy the cheapest possible usb-stick (or even more ideally just burn onto optical), buy the utmost cheapest second hand crap arse laptop, boot it, and pass an http-url on the command-line, to wind up on 'my' system (with 'my' data).

What will keep me using tinycore?  To continue to be an independent distro, that supports 32bit, is TINY, and continues to hold tru to the promises from basically the first chapter of 'into the core'.

I know friends tell me i want alpine, but their website simply doesn't immediately show the properties that i want.. In that regard, the author of into the core did an excellent job, they literally had me at chapter 1..

Also, keep up the good work all, and thanks for this distro, as you can see, I indeed am to dumb to do anything else and depend on tinycore because I can hardly turn back to w2k anno 2024 (sadly).

As for new ideas, me personally wouldn't mind a tiny extra cost: borrowing our customized version of openwrt's super small signify, and have corresponding signed repository. It's just to simple to setup some free wifi access point, and send tinycore requests a bad extension + matching md5...

What would make me leave?
The very moment that GoBo and TinyCore get a bastard child, I'm immediately switching (while at it, ditch lua and PLEASE glue it together with qjs instead, the latest qjs can be statically compiled with muslc to less than 700K !! and i'd promise/guarantee i'd be a main contributor) and i couldn't be more happy to say bye bye to the unix equivalent of dll hell and the insane unix folder-structure, most of wich actually originates with the old farts back when literally running out of their 3MiB diskspace (i do know my history, lol)..