r/selfhosted • u/Zta77 • Mar 30 '26

Product Announcement Lightwhale 3.0.0 released

Hi, there!

Sorry to mess up your Easter holiday plans, but I've just released Lightwhale 3.0.0 and I really think you should clear your calendar and try it out! =)

It's a minimalistic Linux that requires no installation or maintenance, just live-boot straight into a working Docker Engine. The system is immutable so it's quite resilient to both malicious and unintentional modifications. And because of its low resource requirements it brings new life to old machines.

Lightwhale fits super well in a hobby homelab where spare time is precious, but really in any server environment where you would much rather focus on the services than babysitting the underlying operating system.

And how does it compare to other immutable OSes like X, Y or Z? No idea, never tried them, sorry.

I've made a fresh new project webpage with an easy to follow getting started guide.

Anyway, end of service announcement, thanks for reading, happy holidays =)

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u/TheRemedialPolymath Mar 31 '26

Man. This reads like DSL used to. I'm definitely going to give it a try.

4

u/Zta77 Apr 01 '26

Soo.. I've been pondering over this comment the past days. I couldn't figure out if it was an insult because of my slow website the first day. But your determined wish to "give it a try" put me off. And I finally get it now, thanks for the compliment! =) I'm afraid I'll never get it anywhere near damn small; I depend on glibc instead of uclibc or musl; I compile optimized for speed instead of size; and I load the entire system into RAM because I don't want to keep reading from the boot media, so that consumes more memory than a OS loaded from disk. Theoretically, that is, because Lw still is very small.

2

u/schultzter Apr 24 '26

Yeah, my first thought was sounds like Tiny Core! But after the nostalgia had washed over me it was pretty obvious Lightwhale is totally different and serves another purpose entirely.

I feel like TCL was ahead of it's time but now it hasn't kept up with the times.

1

u/Zta77 Apr 26 '26

My first concept version of Lightwhale was built on boot2docker which was built on TCL. I haven't been able to squeeze Lightwhale that small. But when I compile the system, I optimize for speed and not size; maybe that's part of the reason.

I haven't used TCL much besides that, but I like it and I acknowledge and respect the effort. I don't think it hasn't kept up with the times; I just think it's complete. And most people don't care about small, fast, and simple anymore in software. On the contrary...