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).

Solution

https://lemmy.world/comment/10289862

  • yala@discuss.online
    0·
    4 months ago

    Fam, with al due respect, make up your mind; because, unfortunately, it’s not possible to keep up great security practices in conjunction with access to the AUR on a low powered system.

    I’d argue that your best bet is probs Kicksecure. Though, I reckon you’ll have a hard time on a VM regardless.

    • ErrantRoleplayer@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      This is fair and I am willing to look at other distributions. I looked at some of the commands for alpine linux and baulked, worst comes to worst I can alias things though.

      I’ll take a look at it thanks.

  • ErrantRoleplayer@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    Following the comments and response so far, I looked around quite extensively over a broad range of linux distributions. Arch, Alpine, Debian, even Gentoo booting them up and seeing what worked and what didn’t.

    I found AntiX which appears to meet many of my requirements.

    AntiX as a base install comes in at under 2GB HDD and 300MB RAM. By using lighter desktop environments I can push this down even further, admittedly sacrificing some usability.

    It does not, sadly, have access to the AUR as it is Debian, however, there is the Sid repository, which I guess will have to do. It comes pre-loaded with RSync, LibreOffice and Firefox (which I will be booting shortly).

    Even with the base of 300MB, I’m not sure I could manage to run Whonix through it, so I’m going to have to look at a different method to achieve my goals. If you have more RAM, this would be idea.

  • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago
    • Use Arch as the Linux distro. Take advantage of its custom install to reduce the initial footprint.
    • Use a lightweight desktop environment. An extreme example would be starting up OpenBox from startx but there are some others like LxQt that might work.
    • AbiWord/Gnumeric are still alive and you can use them instead of LibreOffice.
    • You can use Mplayer from CLI as video player.
    • Use Transmission or rtorrent instead of Deluge, they take up much less RAM.
    • You can use X2Go instead of RustDesk, it forwards X over SSH; but it doesn’t have NAT traversal. Or you can use Tailscale for NAT traversal, which takes care of encryption too, and then you can use plain VNC for desktop viewing.
    • Some of the stuff you listed are notorious RAM hogs, like VM, most relational databases, browsers. Good luck with that.