3. Distro Super Test – Raspberry Pi Edition 20130503
http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/reviews/distro-super-test-pi-edition
SliTaz 4
A tiny distro supposedly for use on desktop and on server
Overall Score
4/10
SliTaz has a place as a very fast web server, but that is unfortunately all it can do without serious work>So that's why I tried to move from Raspbian to SliTaz.
Have any idea?
SliTaz 4
A tiny distro supposedly for use on desktop and on server
With the smallest image in the test, SliTaz is quick to download, install and boot. In fact, it shows off on startup that it took only three seconds to get to the command line – the fastest in this test. SliTaz is in its fourth version, released in the middle of last year. As an independent distro, not based on anything else, it is one of the genuine few that support hard float operations without being based on Raspbian. Clocking in at only 500MB on the SD card, it’s certainly a feat to have this fully working system on the Pi.
That low storage footprint comes at a price, though: there isn’t much to SliTaz. Coming with a grand total of 17 packages pre-installed, it’s an incredibly lightweight system that the developers themselves admit is meant to eke the max out of the Pi. The problem is, while the full SliTaz repos have a decent selection of packages, the Pi version only has 268. These are mostly utilities, and you can’t install a desktop environment from the repos. However, there is access to Xorg, and all the tools needed to compile it yourself. SliTaz has its own package manager, tazpkg, with a good search function to find what packages are available in lieu of a graphical manager. While you can also search the website for packages, you can’t filter by what’s available on Pi or not.
SliTaz on Pi then is very focused on being used as some kind of headless server, and admittedly thanks to the lack of packages it is fast, and it will draw very little power. The problem is, something like Arch is basically as fast, and the repositories are full of software that will allow you to also make it into a server. Also, you can also very easily turn Arch into a desktop system, something that SliTaz is very noticeably lacking.
SliTaz definitely has its place, and as a server it is quick to set up and has a lower footprint than the others. It just lacks the flexibility inherent in the Raspberry Pi itself.
Overall Score
4/10
SliTaz has a place as a very fast web server, but that is unfortunately all it can do without serious work
