Do yourself a favor and give this distro a try, especially if you are a retrogamer fan. Warning, it’s HUGE (38 gigs, I recommend the torrent)
9 year old me would have FREAKED at how awesome this is. Yes, it’s gaudy. Would I use it every day? probably not. But I am going to have it on another hard drive to fire up when I’m feeling fun! (yes, I realize compiz is 15 years old, I had just forgotten about it ha!)
https://www.commodoreos.net/CommodoreOS.aspx
The forums are up to date and super helpful. I had a little trouble getting it to run on Mint in Virtualbox but just had to change a couple settings (it’s laid out in the forum easily).
Even if you don’t end up installing it for real, if you’re like me you’ll want to steal the startup sound for your own machine!
Also, if you’re into this, give Atari OS a try as well- though it’s no where near as cool, and a lot more stripped down.
Why is it 38GB?
It includes over 200 games, apparently. I’d assume that’s most of it.
Most C64 games are less than 64KB, the largest ones are maybe one megabyte. So counting generously that would be 200MB in total. I think a minimal Linux that runs on most hardware with Vice and game selector front-end would be a gig maximum. So what did they put in there? Uncompressed 4K long play video?
Edit; Oh, 200+ “Linux compatible games”. So they pre-installed whatever Linux distro had in games. But it still sounds excessively large to me. I don’t know if I see the point in downloading everything for an installation when I’m probably not interested in most of it anyway. Then again, weird decisions is legacy Commodore so points for authenticity.
modern linux distros with fancy compiz effects eat up space like crazy - it’s basically a full ubuntu with tons of eye candy, emulators and those 200+ games preinstalled. most of the bloat is probly from the desktop environment and modern dependencies rather than the actual c64 content.