Small OS for a laptop

[Shimano105]

What OS would be the best bet for a very small footprint on a recent laptop?

I tried all the Linux distros (well a lot of em) and came to the conclusion that if I wanted anything to actually work, the smallest OS worth considering was nLited XP.

I like the idea of something like Puppy Linux that runs entirely in RAM using the disk purely for files. So even Ubuntu would be a bit bloated in this resepect (and the Wifi card wouldn't work).

But there was always something that wouldn't work with Linux. Has anything changed over the last year?

[Churchill]

I like QNX

[daviejones]

Have you thought about Vista?

[VectraMan]

MS-DOS? CP/M is pretty small.

[Shimano105]

Woah - just tried latest version of Puppy and it flies. Everything in RAM so it is silent and quick. Wireless works as well.

I've just rebooted into XP and I can't believe I put up with this tulip for so long. Listen? You can still hear the drive whirring away aimlessly even though all I'm doing is typing this.

Ok so I won't be doing any .NET dev with it but for everything else Puppy is fab.

[Cliphead]

Ubuntu based Linux Mint will almost certainly identify all the hardware correctly. You could run a desktop like Fluxbox or xfce.

[bogeyman]

What OS would be the best bet for a very small footprint on a recent laptop?

As Churchill says, QNX is about as small as it comes.

If I might ask, why do you especially want to run an OS with a 'very small footprint' on a 'recent laptop'?

What dev/apps do you intend to run/do on this lean and mean laptop?

[Shimano105]

I'm just running bog standard t'internet, office apps - which is why I'm interested in minimal footprint really.

Shame to have a fairly powerful machine hindered by slow, bloaty OS's when it may as well run as quickly and as silently as possible. Dunno, but this minimal, lean and mean stuff always strikes a chord with me.

[DimPrawn]

I'm just running bog standard t'internet, office apps - which is why I'm interested in minimal footprint really.

Shame to have a fairly powerful machine hindered by slow, bloaty OS's when it may as well run as quickly and as silently as possible. Dunno, but this minimal, lean and mean stuff always strikes a chord with me.

If you've got 4GB of RAM you may as well use it. Get Vista and load everything up. It's a joy.

[Shimano105]

I am going that way for work related stuff (think 8GB with Win 2008 and multiple VMs).

But the laptop is 2GB and with a minimal Linux type OS there are just as many full-featured apps but the hardware stresses are much less, hence the machine performs like a Vista machine could only ever dream of.

An OS that fits your machine rather than t'other way round.