I found an example recently called KolibreOs that runs on my modern PCs just fine but will also run with just 8MB of RAM meaning it will run on a (high end for the time) computer from 1993 just fine....

but how wide can that range get? is there an OS that will run on just 1MB of RAM just as happy as it will on 64GB of DDR4?


and by "new or updated" I mean it has gotten a major release in the past ~10 years I guess will be my cutoff.


Edit... It just dawned on me that KolibreOs could use my main rigs L3 Cache as actual Ram and still have room for a RAM disk on it... yet the HW it is compatible with don't even have L2 Cache.

It is possible to have OS, that runs with low footprint.
Especially the GUI consumes much RAM.

The last line: Cache control is done by CPU.

Yeah I know how cache works in the real world I was just amused by how times have changed that's all.

I found that menuetos passes the old HW test but not the new one... it doesn't even play nice with VirtualBox unless you get the settings exactly how it likes them.

KolibreOS is forked from menuetos, however I never got MenuetOS to boot, and since the 64bit version went proprietary, I decided it wasn't worth my while. KolibreOS never had a problem booting. I need to check out the latest version though.

I don't know how much hardware Tiny Core Linux and Nano Linux run on. But they are blazing fast too, with the cost of being fairly limited.

Slitaz, AntiX Base < 64 or 32 bit>, LinuxBBQ.

More flexible like a Slackel install.

They will pass the cookie crumble test on a core duo.

Hell. If the BSD kernel would play nice on Chromebooks. I would give this a spin on my core duo.

Sensucht94, a friend of mine from the FreeBSD forums, posted today about having set up FreeBSD on a Chromebook and referenced this page at github: