ErrantRoleplayer

One sledgehammer coming up! Of course you're exactly right, I had forgotten about LFS somewhat. It's not for the fainthearted, it's a one stop shop of how to linux like a boss.

It most definitely is lighter than AntiX, it's also on my list like Alpine should AntiX not work out. I don't mind dated GUIs as long as it works. Many thanks.

Trim down is perhaps a strong work. I went in to heavily limit it's performance capabilities, limit the amount of cache it could hold, number of threads it could use and so on. I also stripped out a lot of bloat like pocket and other features that if they couldn't be removed I could turn them off.

AntiX uses IceWM which is much lighter than LXQt apparently. I haven't yet tried Alpine so can't compare the two. AntiX (64bit) barely uses 300MB RAM. AntiX by the way is based on Debian.

SimpleX now has a bin in the AUR, which I believe was made from a .deb file. Fk appimage and the horse it rode in on.

Does Calligra have BASIC capabilities?

Arch linux is too big even as base. I'm currently using 64-bit AntiX which runs (base) half of what Arch-Linux does according to it's own guide. It's using IceWM (which is its heaviest DE). It took a while to investigate believe me, it's also Debian so focuses more on security than Arch does (due in part to Arch's bleeding edge status new vulnerabilities are being added all the time, they're being fixed of course, it's just a natural consequence of their methodology).

I don't believe AbiWord or Gnumeric have BASIC capabilities?

Deluge takes up a tiny amount of ram, I'd recommend investigating the thin client mode. It's smaller than Transmission for me. The non-daemonized client has a memory leak.

Thanks for the tip about X2Go. I'll take a look.

It's in my pile in case AntiX falls through, it weighs in at only 300MB RAM base install.

Bunsenlabs is just slightly too heavy, I know some manage it, it depends on what you're trying to do with it.

Following the comments and response so far, I looked around quite extensively over a broad range of linux distributions. Arch, Alpine, Debian, even Gentoo booting them up and seeing what worked and what didn't.

I found AntiX which appears to meet many of my requirements.

AntiX as a base install comes in at under 2GB HDD and 300MB RAM. By using lighter desktop environments I can push this down even further, admittedly sacrificing some usability.

It does not, sadly, have access to the AUR as it is Debian, however, there is the Sid repository, which I guess will have to do. It comes pre-loaded with RSync, LibreOffice and Firefox (which I will be booting shortly).

Even with the base of 300MB, I'm not sure I could manage to run Whonix through it, so I'm going to have to look at a different method to achieve my goals. If you have more RAM, this would be idea.

I usually use rustdesk on this smaller device to log into my main, which is a decidedly tough nut to otherwise get back to as it's not on a static or exposed ip address. I've tried everything else, VNC cannot access my system, which is unfortunate.

Wayland is not a huge thing for me I can take it or leave it. I'm not expecting performance here for example gaming or such (beyond ZSnes which I swear would work on a suitably grown potato).

I had manjaro on the machine with operated at around 800MB, I was able to run Firefox and Rust desk on it, though I did have to trim some fat off Firefox to get that to work without setting the system into thrash mode.

All good tips!

I think I'll try to aim for a lighter DE but, sure wth it's worth a shot.

Edit:

Debian is a bit high on the demands so I've done some digging and I'm taking a look at AntiX.

Could not even get it to install sighs

This is fair and I am willing to look at other distributions. I looked at some of the commands for alpine linux and baulked, worst comes to worst I can alias things though.

I'll take a look at it thanks.

Gonna trial ArchBang which looks like it's supposed to run at around 500MB worth of RAM.