Hi. I was looking at small linux distros to just run live off usb and all I wanted was a browser. There seems to be several like this or close to it like Porteus and Justbrowsing but the downloads seem unusually large. Porteus was not too bad at 175mb but I think justbrowsing was around 350+ and others I have seen are even larger. Why would just a browser need so much? Is the linux stuff needed to even boot or run anything that large? I assume it is not as I have seen small Puppy versions smaller so I am not sure why this is. Thanks.
To accommodate a range of hardware, many distros ship a kernel containing LOTS of drivers. For small, you might try TinyCore linux distro tinycorelinux.net ...and, upon finding it lacks a driver for your particular soundcard (or whatever) you'll be back to choosing one of those 175MB+ distros (wherein the kernel may comprise 90MB or so of the overall iso size)
Thanks for the replies as I didn't realize the issue with all the drivers included but that now makes sense. And my usb drives are much larger than that I was just curious why the files seemed so large even for the small distros and take some time to download. But a follow up question is has anyone used either Porteus or Justbrowsing and if so would you recommend them? Thanks.
Across version releases, I have repeatedly test-driven porteus. I've never bothered to testdrive "justbrowsing". Hands-down, I prefer antix. In the absence of antix, I would choose one of the slack-derived puppy variants (hmm fatdog64) over porteus. Comparatively, the porteus persistence setup & management is just too unwieldy (as in, overly clever & unnecessarily complex). It takes less than 5min to create a liveUSB from iso. Do it. Enjoy a little taste of distrohopping & make your own comparisons, eh. (I hope you'll report back afterward. I'm curious to hear your distrohopping observations.)