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).
I usually use rustdesk on this smaller device to log into my main, which is a decidedly tough nut to otherwise get back to as it’s not on a static or exposed ip address. I’ve tried everything else, VNC cannot access my system, which is unfortunate.
Wayland is not a huge thing for me I can take it or leave it. I’m not expecting performance here for example gaming or such (beyond ZSnes which I swear would work on a suitably grown potato).
I had manjaro on the machine with operated at around 800MB, I was able to run Firefox and Rust desk on it, though I did have to trim some fat off Firefox to get that to work without setting the system into thrash mode.
All good tips!
If you want a secure system you need Wayland. X11 is extremely insecure, search on the internet and you find why.
But if you just need the VNC client no problem.
If you want a server, have a look at KRFB. But yes, needing static IPs suck. You could use a free DynDNS service like NoIP for that.
Trim down FF, like compile it yourself? That is for sure possible, you might want to use the ESR release to do that. You can leave out some things I suppose.
Just start with Alpine, which uses busybox and musl and is thus security focused and smaller.
Try a DE like LXQt, I will give it another go.
You can use it with X11 for now and replace the compositor in the future.
Some apps if you stick to just Qt (not that useful as Firefox will load in GTK stuff)
Trim down is perhaps a strong work. I went in to heavily limit it’s performance capabilities, limit the amount of cache it could hold, number of threads it could use and so on. I also stripped out a lot of bloat like pocket and other features that if they couldn’t be removed I could turn them off.
AntiX uses IceWM which is much lighter than LXQt apparently. I haven’t yet tried Alpine so can’t compare the two. AntiX (64bit) barely uses 300MB RAM. AntiX by the way is based on Debian.
SimpleX now has a bin in the AUR, which I believe was made from a .deb file. Fk appimage and the horse it rode in on.
Does Calligra have BASIC capabilities?
Yes LXQt is simple the only light DE I know that will have Wayland support very soon. There are many others of course.
But you mentioned security, so that is that. Apart from an actual threat model which you didnt yet mention.
Compiling Firefox minimally vs just disabling it (like Librewolf does) is different.
Same with a custom Kernel with only the needed modules.
Forgot about BASIC, no idea never used it.