smallX/TinyX: what are the cons?

[hop-frog]

I was wondering is someone had experience using smallX (http://www.superant.com/smalllinux/tinyX01.html) and what problems there are with it. In other words: why isn't everyone using it?

[mdwatts]

Let's see if the /dev/random crowd have anything to say on smallX/TinyX. :)

[o0zi]

Well, some people are.
The minimalist and fast distro crowd - Damn Small, Feather, Flonix and so on - all use Kdrive (the current name for TinyX). It's much faster and uses less memory, but there are several problems with it.
First of all, not all cards are supported. The Intel i810 chips, for instance, have limited colour modes under Kdrive. Some hardware is also very difficult to use - some mice may not be supported, some laptops may have trouble, and specialist hardware such as touchscreens is simply not possible to use. In some cases, mice may be very slow or unresponsive. Also, some applications that use extensions such as OpenGL will have problems with Kdrive, and as such it's very difficult to coerce a DE/WM such as KDE 3.2 to operate under such milieu.
Some extensions that make life easier for the user aren't available either - XRandR, for example.
In essence, Kdrive is perfect for those set-ups where you only want to run a wordprocessor or something similar on utterly standard hardware, but for games and other graphics intensive applications, complex DE/WMs and specialist hardware it's not as useful.

[JohnT]

You can install something as minimal as this with Slackware and still have the ability to add packages very easily when needed......HERE (http://www.slackware.com/install/softwaresets.php)