Suitability
How well do they perform on underpowered hardware?
This is another area where the candidates are more or less equally matched, with some slight differences. As all the distros cater to underpowered machines, they ship with a large number of lightweight apps.
For instance, antix boots into a ICEWM desktop by default and uses the Rox file manager, but it boasts about a dozen other combinations of lightweight window and file managers. It even offers a core edition that ships with just enough applications to help you build your desktop from scratch.
Bionicpup uses JWM, which is one of the lightest window managers and most of the productivity is derived from resourcerespecting custom apps. The lightweight edition of Q4OS uses the Trinity desktop and requires anything upwards of a 300MHZ processor and 128MB RAM. However we found it to be quite sluggish, even on a machine with three times more resources than the minimum requirements.
Similarly, Bunsenlabs – which features the Openbox window manager with the tint2 panel and Conky system monitor on the desktop – can theoretically boot on machines with 256MB of RAM, but it wouldn’t really be much fun to operate.
Tiny Core however, true to its name, performs exceedingly well on antiquated machines: it’ll run on a i486 computer with just 48MB RAM. For a smoother timne though its developers recommend a Pentium 2 or better computer with 128MB of RAM. Those are some pretty impressive minimum requirements.