I have installed DSL on a 64 Gb USB.  I have found the the boot time is about 10 Minutes on my SONY VAIO VGN SR-290J.  Same USB of DSL boots up within minutes on my HP 245 G6 laptop.  

That much of difference is there, in boot time. 

After initial boot the speed is pretty fast on both the laptops.

This is my first post here and first post on any BB in long time, so hello everybody!

First, I tested DSL 2024 in VirtualBox, but later I decided to do proper testing on real hardware. For testing I used around 17 year old HP TC4400. It's barely usable with normal Linux, so I was curious to see how it'll perform with DSL. Here are it's specs:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo T5600 2x1,8Ghz
RAM: 2GB DDR2
Screen: 1024x768, 12'
Stock HDD was replaced with 120GB SSD.

Installation
---

Booting from installation media wasn't without problems. Booting in normal mode caused X server to crash and go into some sort of boot loop. Unfortunately, because it was live session, I couldn't retrieve any log files, but this problem seems very similar to one described here: https://damnsmalllinux.org/forums/thread-9.html. After booting using safe mode installation was flawless. Problem with X never occured on installed OS, in fact, I'm writing this post from DSL installed on said notebook.

First post-install impressions
--

I disabled automatic login, so after booting I was greeted with logging screen. It wasn't beautiful but did it's job. Default Fluxbox desktop looks nice and it's quite intuitive and lightweight - RAM usage around 100MB in stock system is something I last saw in Lubuntu 14.something (if I exclude Xless server installs). Wifi card was detected, I was easly able to connect to my Wi-Fi network - conman window appeared automatically after login. I think this is good thing, because there is not network icon in the tray.

Overall system feels snappy, but I was curious what BadWolf browser can do on these specs. After using it for a while I can say that it's nice that it includes switch to disable JS. It can really help browse the Web on slow hardware. Overall I think it's a good choice for this distro - you can browse javascript-less Web without sites being broken by insufficient CSS support like in Dillo, which is also included in default install.

What's also not included is GTK3 theme and any icon set, which results in missing icon symbols all over the system and BadWolf blasting my eyes with white background where the rest of the system is in rather dark color scheme. But this isn't something that one apt install couldn't fix, but then you are losing default look.

Coming to the end of this lengthy post I think the alpha release of DSL is nice base for great distro for making potato computers slightly less potato. Of course there are rough edges - like when I try switch theme in JWM it didn't work - but this was most straightforward lightweight Linux distro installation ever (not counting Xorg crashing in live session), maybe second to Q4OS with Trinity. No 2137 editions/flavours, no 200 preinstalled programs. Just simple distro that you can install and get at least some job done, even on 20 year old pc.

I will try to reproduce that X server crash and retrive logs somehow, maybe it'll help solve that problem for future releases.

   
Screenshot attached. This popped up when I booted in safe mode installed on VMware. Here it shows how DSL in 1280x786 looks like on a 13" HD screen. Thought it might be useful to see (the popup).

// meo

Is the package systemd held back?

// meo

Im experiencing this. I seems to be a harware (CPU) issue that's patched in later linux kernels. Here comes a quote:

"Mitigations for RETBleed were patched into the Linux kernel at 5.18.14. Linux Lite uses 5.15. Honestly, it's not something the average user ought to worry about that much, but if your processor is affected, mitigations are available in all kernels 5.18 or newer."

So that seems to be the my problem with DSL in a nutshell. I have compiled a lot of kernels before, some time ago, would like to know what kernel I should aim for.

// meo

It has been a while since I last used DSL and when I saw this new release I figured I'd try reviving an old Toshiba Satellite A20 laptop. Speced with a P4 2.8GHz, 512MB ram, 55GB hard drive. And it works great. The default Fluxbox is excellent, but I decided I would install Awesome WM as I use that daily, and it is working beautifully.

My only problem is I can't seem to shutdown the computer from the login screen, I have no mouse cursor there and I'm not sure what keys to use.

BadWolf works well, can be a bit laggy, so going to try NetSurf. I tried loading Youtube but BadWolf freezes loading it. Of course I never expected to watch any videos on Youtube on this machine.

Here are some shots of Awesome WM on DSL with the excellent wallpaper that ships with DSL.

Attached Files

Thumbnail(s)
               

1. After installing DSL, my screen resolution was only 800 x 600. Installing firmware-amd-graphics fixed the problem (I'm able to get my native resolution of 1280 x 720).

2. My Wifi uses the Broadcom BCM4313 driver. Connman shows that wifi is powered, but I'm unable to connect. Connman's "Wireless" window shows nothing. I can connect using AntiX. A method you suggested didn't help:

$ iwconfig
lo   no wireless extensions.
eth0    no wireless extensions.

$ ifconfig wlan0 up
wlan0: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device

3. Many options in Control Centre seem to do nothing at all, e.g. Edit JWM, Set Date and Time, nothing appears under Drivers and Maintenance, etc. I don't know whether this is a bug or you simply haven't installed these functions yet.

4. I get this error after using apt (I get the same error with AntiX):

(desktop-menu:3532): Gtk-CRITICAL **: 16:34:59.859: gtk_icon_theme_get_for_screen: assertion 'GDK_IS_SCREEN (screen)' failed
Writing Menu: jwm
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/desktop-menu", line 477, in <module>
    build_menu()
  File "/usr/local/bin/desktop-menu", line 313, in build_menu
    process_menu(menu)
  File "/usr/local/bin/desktop-menu", line 219, in process_menu
    icon = find_icon(entry) or default_folder_icon
          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/usr/local/bin/desktop-menu", line 148, in find_icon
    if icon_theme.lookup_icon(appicon, icon_size, 0) and not no_gtk:
      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'lookup_icon'

5. Programs I installed (firefox-esr, libreoffice, etc.) don't appear in the menu; I tried using "Refresh Menu".

6. Anecdotal testing shows that DSL is just a little "lighter" than AntiX x64.

Still pounding on it.  Super-solid here so far (nice job and thanks!)--more machines to try.  Got a list going and I'll be back when I get it concise.  For now, questions:

1)  Is there anything in here that'll do screen dumps besides xwd (the format of which is ~low utility w/o convert from imagemagick). 
2)  Seeing feh and fbi for images...and mtpaint--is that it?

Thanks.  And thanks again for doing it at all--this is deeply cool to have in 2024!

Tried to install Zoom today since it seems that the webcam on my laptop is ready to go. Zoom isn't part of the regular debian repository but it can be downloaded. So I installed the dependencies and then, as said, I tried to install it. Unfortunately it depends on several packages that are held back with the antix desktop metapackage. In other words it didn't work in the present environment. So I'll have to wait for the next version of dsl that probably will sort out a lot of the present snags.

// meo

I remember vividly how cool it was to run DSL entirely from RAM. So, that's a feature I would like to see in upcoming releases. That would be really nice and since the specs of the computers (even older ones) usually have sufficient RAM to be able to use that boot option I think many users would like it.

// meo