I have a feeling that people who are genuinely impressed by long term vibe coding on a single project are only impressed because they don't know any better.
Take writing a book, or blog post; writing a good blog post, or a chapter of a book, takes lots of skill and practice. The results are very satisfying and usually add value to both the writer's life as well as the reader's. When someone who has done that uses AI and sees the slop it generates, he's not impressed, probably even frustrated.
However, someone who can barely write a couple coherent sentences, would be baffled at how well AIs can put together sentences, paragraphs, and have a somewhat coherent train of thought through the entire text. People who struggled in school with writing an introduction and a conclusion will be amazed at AIs writing. They would maybe even assume that "those paragraphs actually add no meaning and are purely fluff" is a totally normal part of writing and not an AI artifact.
I’m impressed by getting the output of at least a mediocre developer at less than 1% of the cost. Brute force is an underrated strategy. I’ve been having a great experience.
That developers in the Hacker News comment bin report experiences that align with their personal financial interests doesn’t really dissuade me.
You're missing that the D in CI/CD means deployment; be that packaging on pushing tags and publishing to a registry, or building images, or packaging github releases.
I knew someone who ran it with inittab about 3 decades ago, and I very much doubt they were the only one. Emacs could be used as a full-blown OS long ago. It just depends on your needs.
Also, the psychotherapist was one of a kind ;)
Personally, I could live with tmux or zellij as PID 1. Because from there I can do everything, except GUI. Might as well use Sway then to achieve virtually the same.
That's the main legal use-case afaik. If you like travelling to a country that has no banking connection to your country, it might be more convenient to open a bank account or make friends in the target country and move money there via Bitcoin marketplaces. I've seen that plenty of times.
How does that work? You transfer the money in BTC, you exchange that into real money, you open a new bank account, you deposit that money, the bank's anti-money-laundering detection sees a large deposit to a newly open account and triggers an alert, the bank locks you out of the account and asks you for a proof of income/tax payment, you have no explanation of where that money came from legally, they freeze your account and report you to their local revenue services, you're SOL.
You can run an entire, productive modern Linux, (minus a modern browser*) on 128MB of RAM and one slow core. If you push lower, you start running into issues. I would recommend having around 200MB or so of swap for sudden spikes of memory usage. An aggressive userspace OOM killer may make life easier.
On Linux, if you just run SDDM that launches xfce, you will quickly OOM the system, because SDDM will stay in memory. The same goes for most desktop managers. So the real way is to just `startx` your desktop environment directly and use console login.
i3 is the best call for usability/a modern feeling, with extremely low memory usage. The reasoning is that, if you're used to sway or i3, this will feel like home, and it has all the features you need to be productive. Anything else will eat more RAM, from what I've tried. It also feels really fast, even if your GPU is struggling, because there are no animations and very little movement.
I would personally recommend Alpine, as it really comes with nothing extra. You can then install a desktop environment manually (or use their setup-desktop script if you have plenty of RAM and storage). TinyCore is a bit too wild to do modern computing on; the paradigms are just too outdated, the installation is a bit of a pain, and the installer would OOM on the same system where I can run my entire i3 alpine setup.
DSL seems cool, I haven't tried it; I just wanted to share my experience.
You can try all of this by setting up a qemu VM. Be aware that you will need more RAM just for the BIOS, so maybe if you configure 210MB, youll end up with around 128 usable, or so. Your OS will report how much is usable, accurately.
You can then set CPU cores with usage limits, limit HDD speeds to 2000's HDD speeds (so that your swap isnt fast), and so on. Its a fun exercise to try to develop software on such a limited machine, and its fun to see which software launches and which doesn't.
*: the browser is an issue. Firefox is the preferrable option, but wouldn't launch on so little RAM. NetSurf or elinks/lynx etc. is the way to go, but websites that rely on JS to work, like any and all Rust documentation sites, will be completely unusable.
DSL is much older, and the original version came as a 50MB disk image.
Current version clocks in ~700MB, again very small when compared to any modern Linux installation media.
On the other hand, it seems like DSL takes a more extreme approach to slimming down i3/XFCE route, plus DSL contains Dillo which is arguably the latest modern-ish (to the most extent possible) and lightest browser in existence.
These days, DSL is just Debian with less installed. The 700 MB is a curated list of software chosen to fit on a CD image but you access to the full Debian repos.
It's kind of cheating, but I wonder if you could set up some kind of "server side rendering proxy" that would run all the JS on a given page, and send the client a plain html page with hyperlinks in place of interactive JS elements.
Opera Mini's "extreme mode" takes this approach. The server pre-renders content, also stripping out things the client doesn't need or that would require a lot of resources/bandwidth.
Note that this does present a bit of a man-in-the-middle scenario, and Opera's chief income is from advertising (and "query").
"Back in the day" people were running HP technical workstations, with X11 with CDE, with 128MB RAM, on Pentium-II equivalent speed CPUs - and they liked it!
Another distro worth noting here is EasyOS, a current project by Puppy Linux creator Barry Kauler: https://easyos.org/
I remember having tested it, but can't remember what it was like :) -- at least it didn't make me switch from Tiny Core Linux, which I've used extensively. From a superficial, distro-hopper view, DSL, Puppy, EasyOS and Tiny Core all feel quite similar, I guess.
As a side note, it is interesting to see DSL and TC on the HN front page in two consecutive days of 2025. Both are very old projects; I wonder what's the impulse behind this current interest.
Don't forget the links2 classic web browser! (still missing the <video> and <audio> element support on x11/wayland though).
Server side rendering will collect(steal) personal info, it is a no go. The only right solution is online services to provide a web site on the side of a whatng cartel web app, if the online service does fit ofc. No other way, and hardcore regulation is very probably required.
I had no issues at all running alpine with a UI on a simulated 128MB RAM machine with a few GB of storage (with simulated 2000's disk speeds). That's 128MB not counting memory for the BIOS, of course.
i3 and NetSurf made that extremely possible. Mind you, the only things that didn't work well were Firefox (wouldn't launch due to OOM) and compiling Rust projects. Single translation units in Rust would immediately OOM the system, whereas C, C++, etc. worked fine.
Take writing a book, or blog post; writing a good blog post, or a chapter of a book, takes lots of skill and practice. The results are very satisfying and usually add value to both the writer's life as well as the reader's. When someone who has done that uses AI and sees the slop it generates, he's not impressed, probably even frustrated.
However, someone who can barely write a couple coherent sentences, would be baffled at how well AIs can put together sentences, paragraphs, and have a somewhat coherent train of thought through the entire text. People who struggled in school with writing an introduction and a conclusion will be amazed at AIs writing. They would maybe even assume that "those paragraphs actually add no meaning and are purely fluff" is a totally normal part of writing and not an AI artifact.
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