this post was submitted on 26 May 2024
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Have a look at alpine.
For the DE, something very light is needed and I would use Wayland for security AND performance.
Problem: apart from RaspberryPiOS I know no dedicated lightweight wayland DE.
They use Wayfire, but one of these will work too.
Then for the apps, good luck running a Browser at that low.
You will need only system packages, nothing else. Might try Bubblejail for sandboxing without using Flatpak (disk space, RAM). But that is in pretty early stages.
For your apps
I think Qt can work, pcmanfm-qt is nice.
LXQt 6.1 will have "full" Wayland support, but you need to configure stuff in config files of course.
I dont know a modern Wayland ready GTK alternative to GNOME.
I would avoid Alpine if you have a older machine as the way Alpine packages the kernel can be hit or miss. The upside is that the Alpine kernel is fast and secure.
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.