Either pxe netboot or usb or installable. Immuttable or not. Ramfs. With a host selector or fully auto login ?

Ultra light 16 to 128mb storage 64-128mb ram. Or “full sized”

And lastly, something like that, but that would run on a proxmox host.

    • LiveLMEnglish
      4·
      7 months ago

      I second this, Alpine is seriously tiny!

  • Possibly linuxEnglish
    9·
    7 months ago

    You can’t display things and run in a low memory footprint. That’s not how it works as you need a buffer.

    What are you trying to do? You could build a custom image but that it likely harder than you need.

      • Possibly linuxEnglish
        71·
        7 months ago

        For video it is. Unless you want your desktop to be in 128p

        • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          3·
          7 months ago

          It’s probably plenty for vnc or spice though. I had a 486 with 8mb of video RAM that could do 1024x748 display resolutions…

          • Possibly linuxEnglish
            26·
            7 months ago

            no you can’t. That would require 1.6mb of ram for a single frame. In reality you need lots and lots of frames with hardware decoding plus network overhead.

            Not to mention that CPU would be way to slow to run anything but the bare Linux kernel (also the kernel requires 8mb)

            Edit: I misread. I thought you were talking about computer memory not video memory. That makes more sense. Although your 30 year old CPU isn’t going to be running VNC or Spice any time soon. (Your welcome to prove me wrong)

      • db2@lemmy.world
        34·
        7 months ago

        Megabytes, a thousand of which make a gigabyte. Chrome in my machine right now is taking over one gigabyte of memory, that alone is using more than 8 times what OP wants the whole system to. It’s definitely an ask for low memory, almost embedded levels of ram.

        • SuperIce@lemmy.worldEnglish
          13·
          7 months ago

          Chrome is actually doing a lot of work to display modern webpages though. A thin client only needs to receive a video stream and send inputs to a server. That can be done with an extremely low memory footprint. The Steam Link only had 512MB of RAM and it actually ran a steam client (which contains embedded chromium) instead of acting as a pure thin client.

        • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.mlOP
          2·
          7 months ago

          I wouldn’t be against something that needs 1gb or 4gb. Of course it’s different hardware class, but if it actually does a better job, it would be fine.

          Although I suspect for a thin client, 512mb would be more than enough and adding more wouldn’t improve much of anything.

  • variants@possumpat.ioEnglish
    5·
    7 months ago

    I’ve been using crunchbang++ on a Dell wyse thin client laptop. It doesn’t auto login or anything but seem to work fine I got it on woot for 60 buckd

  • SuperIce@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    7 months ago

    I imagine you could find a lot of options. Just a quick google turned up ThinStation, which only needs 30-50MB if storage and 64MB+ of RAM. A bit outdated, but should work fine.

    You could also make your own OS with LFS if you want to optimize it to the extreme.

    • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.mlOP
      3·
      7 months ago

      Thanks that looks pretty good. Ihad searched and found nothing. The internet is full of folks who “just get X linux distro and write a bunch of scripts”

      It even supports Spice. Only thing missing is moonlight support !