kmandla has explored many of the really exotic distros and documented them here, so kmandla’s threshold for interesting may be a lot higher than most people (and maybe you), but for most users, stock Ubuntu will feel totally different than TinyCore, as will openSuse, and CrunchBang, and Puppy, and many others. But even in the DistroWatch top 20 distros, there is a good bit of variety in the things like:

WM / Desktop extras (menus, icons, launchers, “tray” applets)
Preferred GUI toolkit
Base software size
Software package management (source/binary, repository structure, GUI for management)

My point is that there are distros that don’t just stick to the mainstream Gnome or KDE, RPM or DEB paradigms, which can give them a fairly unique feel and potential benefits. Even if the “the core software that manages it” as kmandla puts it is mostly the same under the covers.

TinyCore sounds cool and I may even download it to a LiveCD to check it out. But we’re still just discussing the default applications that the distro ships with. How does it “include and emphasize” FLTK? By shipping with them. How is FLTK the native toolkit? Because it ships with them. Can I install GTK in TinyCore? Yes. Can I use FLTK in Ubuntu? Yes. What makes TinyCore different from any other distro? The applications that come pre-installed.

While the default application choices dramatically change the user experience of a new user, once someone is familiar with the package manager and finding software they like, all distros begin to blur and look the same when the only difference is the default applications.

I assume you are replying to my posting about FLTK apps. The apps I wrote are not strictly tied to TinyCore Linux. In fact, I’ve compiled and run them acceptably in Fedora and I’ve heard some reports of people using them in others. As a mostly-solitary developer, I don’t invest a lot of time to make sure each app works perfectly on a wide variety of other distros, but I will try to address problems that people tell me, as long as doing so won’t impact my goal of being fast, light, and useful in the “home” distro of TinyCore.

As far as uniqueness, TinyCore is the only popular distro I know that includes and emphasizes ultralight-weight FLTK apps (although Bodhi is built on somewhat bigger eFLTK software). In TinyCore, you can install GTK, or Qt apps if you want, and many users do, but FLTK is considered the “native” toolkit for apps. So I’d say TinyCore is different from a lot of the “me too” remasters or “like XYZ but even more IJK” variant distros out there, where IJK is “friendly” or “pretty” or “libre” or “secure” or “bleeding-edge” or whatever issue motivates a distro developer or team.

Re: The new FLTK applications: That’s wonderful to here. New software is always great. But is the software tied into the OS or can it be installed in any distro? If it can run in any distro, it may be a wonderful lightweight alternative suite – which is wonderful – but that is in a software suite, not a distro.

Having spent the last five years getting to grips with the basics of Ubuntu/Debian (still a newbie ) it’s hard to move away and learn a new set of rules and commands, although every now and then I have another go at Slitaz or Tinycore, but always end up coming back to a CLI install of Xubuntu and building from there.

Anyway my distro is based upon that above, with openbox, and tint2 and wbar to help control the thing. I doubt I’ll get round to uploading it for the masses, but at least I won’t have to build it again

It’s that final 10% that can really set them apart though, and this is where we at Fuduntu are largely (but not completely) focused.

The TinyCore core team has developed a graphical package manager, a main control panel, and several other simple utilities. The Filemanager “Fluff” I wrote for TinyCore is about 120 KB with many of the features of big file managers. It’s included in the TinyCore base system. Some other optional apps I wrote are a collection of tray-type applets (battery monitor/clock/sound volume control), a kinda-calculator workpad app, and a picture viewer/slideshow app. And I’m working on a wireless networking management GUI.

I know kmandla has tried TinyCore without much success on older machines. TinyCore uses a fairly modern kernel and build options, so it is not really optimal for hardware older than perhaps eight years or so. But if you can run it, it is extremely fast and quite light. You can keep it stripped down, or add as many apps as you like. Some people will think the FLTK-based apps are plain, if not ugly. But I really enjoy using it and also enjoy creating new things for it, to see how much I can get it to do while keeping it small, fast, and light.