Opinion Poll - Light/Lighter Porteus

[edeplus]

Opinion Poll:

Has Porteus lost it's way at being a light/lighter Linux Distro?

The smallest ISO for Porteus-V5.01 (x86_64) now exceeds 530MB.
Could this size still be consider a light/lighter distribution?
Could/Should Porteus do better?

An enquiring mind wants to know.

[Ed_P]

The kernel keeps growing to support more hardware.

Common Linux ISO Sizes by Type
Minimal / Netinstall ISOs: 50 MB – 300 MB (e.g., small network installers that download packages during setup).
Ultra-Lightweight Distros: 300 MB – 700 MB (e.g., Puppy Linux or Bodhi Linux designed for older hardware).
Standard Desktop Distros: 1.5 GB – 3.5 GB (e.g., Fedora, Arch Linux, or Linux Mint).
Feature-Heavy Desktop Distros: 3.8 GB – 5.8 GB (e.g., Ubuntu, openSUSE, or Zorin OS with bundled software and offline drivers).

[fu11m00n]

IMHO... the largest Porteus increase occured about a decade ago when LLVM became a dependency of Mesa (about a 100mb iso increase in size).

The question for me since 2014 has been (in terms of use case) what does "light" even mean?

TinyCore Linux is many magnitudes lighter (size?) than Porteus (in default iso size).
However... (in terms of use case) the caveat becomes... lighter @ what cost?

TinyCore's default iso starts off small but after remastering sane package defaults to have coherent functionality... (in iso size) it starts to look like Porteus.

Whether TinyCore or Porteus if your default desktop is KDE instead of Fluxbox the question becomes... is there a memory/performance tax?

In that case then the idea of "light" becomes somewhat nebulous (this why I combine LXQT with Blackbox to get Qt/C++ "light").
And the real question is... if "light" = "size of iso" what are you truncating to get a smaller iso size?

This is where I concurred with AlienBob (over 10 years ago in this forum) when he was questioned on the difference between Porteus and his "live" Slackware project.

His position was that the difference is... his project is 100% Slackware.

100% Slackware (@ minimum) is Linux From Scratch (and all dependencies and sub dependencies)
plus the complete Slackware.uk "/a" directory (+ LLVM... and half of the X11 "/x" directory plus a gui web browser and a DE).

Also... complete 100% package resolution (to prevent resource starvation) and no package stripping or cherry picking libraries (or any kind of kludging gimmicks).

The reason why my OS project is similar to AlienBob's is I do the same thing by hand (painstakingly) using Depfinder and IsoMaster.

So the instead of an iso that is < 500mb... you get an iso that is > 700mb (the size of my OS project currently stands @ 1.3gb).
IMHO... both in terms of iso size (and runtime process memory footprint) that's a lot of truncated "mitigation" (kludging?).

Don't get me wrong... I'm good with kludging. I do it all the time with scripting and configuration (just not with packages).

But I digress. For me "light" means other than 100% Slackware (minimal install)...
it means LXQT plus Blackbox (but ultimately... LXQT + "Oroborus" window manager rewritten in Fil-C and DirectFB2).

So to your original question. Can Porteus do better? Possibly. But @ what cost?

[Vic]

Fully functional KDE that fits on a CD ( 700 MiB ). WOW!

I cannot find any other distro that comes close.

My PorteuX main folder is 5 GiB.

My MX KDE remaster is 2.4 Gib.

My TinyCore tce folder is 2.5 GiB.

My Puppy Slacko partition use is 6 Gib.

Small is unusable to me. There are always necessary programs that pump up the size. No way around that.

Vic

[fu11m00n]

My LXQT build is >700mb (greater than)... my project's iso is currently @ 1.3gb (but it is 100% Slackware just like AlienBob's project).