Back To The Mainframe? (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-04 00:28 (#2T2Y) You paint a very appealing picture, Zafe. But.... With that light and underfeatured a system, relying so much on external services, might one/you be better served by a fixed appliance/terminal? No chance of corruption, everything in Da Cloud, etc. All the real action happens on your and other remote servers.'Cause it sounds like that's what a superlight distro is accomplishing anyway, only with the vagaries and vulnerabilities of normal PC hardware. Re: Back To The Mainframe? (Score: 1) by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-10-04 19:28 (#2T39) Maybe - but imagine an internet kiosk that boots from a read-only flash card, and runs from memory. You get a clean system with every boot, and if that gets you a reasonably good-looking desktop and an up-to-date version of Firefox, you've met the needs of 90% of your clients. Imagine a kiosk in a hotel lobby, for example.Imagine a call center or database entry place where you can re-purpose some dirt-cheap, low-spec hardware. That's useful.For me, on a more philosophical level, this is also interesting because it shows it can be done. The world would be a different place if developers were forced to be miserly with resources and think carefully about their constraints. Give everyone a new macbook with 5G of RAM and a top-speed hard drive, and you get akonadi/nepomuk (barf). Re: Back To The Mainframe? (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-05 14:45 (#2T3Z) Thanks, but still not seeing it. Going to the trouble of putting up a kiosk means that sub 100 MB or sub 1 GB storage is not a problem. Ditto for older hardware. Can't most distros still get running on a 486 or so?I get that it's an interesting exercise, and I hate bloat more than most anyone, but I'm still not quite seeing the real world appeal. I guess embedded devices maybe, or something to contribute to wearables?
Re: Back To The Mainframe? (Score: 1) by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-10-04 19:28 (#2T39) Maybe - but imagine an internet kiosk that boots from a read-only flash card, and runs from memory. You get a clean system with every boot, and if that gets you a reasonably good-looking desktop and an up-to-date version of Firefox, you've met the needs of 90% of your clients. Imagine a kiosk in a hotel lobby, for example.Imagine a call center or database entry place where you can re-purpose some dirt-cheap, low-spec hardware. That's useful.For me, on a more philosophical level, this is also interesting because it shows it can be done. The world would be a different place if developers were forced to be miserly with resources and think carefully about their constraints. Give everyone a new macbook with 5G of RAM and a top-speed hard drive, and you get akonadi/nepomuk (barf). Re: Back To The Mainframe? (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-05 14:45 (#2T3Z) Thanks, but still not seeing it. Going to the trouble of putting up a kiosk means that sub 100 MB or sub 1 GB storage is not a problem. Ditto for older hardware. Can't most distros still get running on a 486 or so?I get that it's an interesting exercise, and I hate bloat more than most anyone, but I'm still not quite seeing the real world appeal. I guess embedded devices maybe, or something to contribute to wearables?
Re: Back To The Mainframe? (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-05 14:45 (#2T3Z) Thanks, but still not seeing it. Going to the trouble of putting up a kiosk means that sub 100 MB or sub 1 GB storage is not a problem. Ditto for older hardware. Can't most distros still get running on a 486 or so?I get that it's an interesting exercise, and I hate bloat more than most anyone, but I'm still not quite seeing the real world appeal. I guess embedded devices maybe, or something to contribute to wearables?