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I'm looking for a lightweight, low requirement distro to run on this WROL computer project I'm building. It will either be based on a raspberry pi 3 or an old netbook. It needs to be able to be able to easily browse various file types and archives without internet. I probably will never use it to browse the web, just files and a couple of different applications like VLC. I've also never used Linux before, except rasbian. I considered AntiX, but their site has communist junk on it, so that's out.

I'm looking for a lightweight, low requirement distro to run on this WROL computer project I'm building. It will either be based on a raspberry pi 3 or an old netbook. It needs to be able to be able to easily browse various file types and archives without internet. I probably will never use it to browse the web, just files and a couple of different applications like VLC. I've also never used Linux before, except rasbian. I considered AntiX, but their site has communist junk on it, so that's out.

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[–] • 3 pts

Try damn small linux

[–] • 2 pts

+1, I think the ISO for DSL is around 200MB or so

[–] • 1 pt

They have a 50mb still I do believe. It's smallest Linux distribution out that I'm aware of

[–] • 1 pt

Thanks for the suggestion. Looks interesting.

[–] • 2 pts

Puppy Linux has always been my go-to for light and small. Not sure if it would work for your requirements

[–] • 2 pts (edited )

It'll have at least 2 gigs of ram, so the minimum requirements are definitely within capability. All I want to do with it is view PDFs, videos and archives offline.

[–] • 1 pt

It's a good little solution then. I mainly use it as my rescue thumb stick, but it's really full featured because of the two distros it mainly works off of.

[–] • 1 pt

Others have already suggested Damn Small Linux.

Really, It depends if you want a graphical interface. You can play video from the command line too.

Almost any distro using the "minimal" install will work great. Just only install what you need. as also mentioned, Xfce is a really good minimal low-resource GUI and I have ran it even on "good" hardware just because I dont want to take the resource hit.

If you are going to go with a Raspberry Pi you might be a little more limited on the distros supported but that is always a given. An old netbook (x86) based would probably be a lot better and will come with all of the things like screen/keyboard/network etc... that you would add on anyway.

[–] • 1 pt

Graphical interface is probably a must have for me. I will be using this to store about 2TB of info (pdfs, videos, pics). I imagine that would be a pain to sort through without a GUI.

[–] • 0 pt

Are you planning on having it "off the grid" for a long time but might need packages you did not initially install? You can have that on other external media and setup your repo's to use it (like Flash Drives or DVD's/BluRay/etc). That would also be a factor. You will only get a "snapshot in time" for those repos but its something to consider.

[–] • 1 pt

puppy linux comes to mind, but its been years since i've dabbled.. if youre using a pi, i would just stick with that os. i'm pretty sure that every distro out there could be slimmed down to meet your requirements.

[–] • 1 pt

Here are a couple requirements I can think of for you:

Select a lightweight graphical interface at install time. Maybe Xfce, but there may be others.

Select a distro with dependency aware package manager. Most have this. This way you only install what you need.

If you really need to watch storage install i486 binaries or, "-oS," (size optimized) if available - will be smaller but still work with your CPU.

[–] • 0 pt

I needed something similar a few months back. Old hardware, etc. I ended up using Lubuntu after others failed to work for one reason or another. Works pretty well for what I needed.