I wouldn't use DSL these days, it's very old :)

DSL's goal was to provide most of the tools you might need in a tiny footprint. The platform target was the old "thin-client" style machines which might pack a 500 MHz AMD Geode or a VIA C3 processo and have either no internal storage or maybe a few hundred megabytes for preboot environments.

They were able to fit X (Xfree86, iirc) w/ Fluxbox, Firefox, Ted (a word processor), and a few other things into a 50 MB "bizcard" image (PCMCIA cards & compact flash).

Another thing it was designed to do was allow you to install most of the common things to a small internal storage device, while running the rest off of optical media.

It dates to the time before common support for USB booting. Also kinda crazy to realize you could fit Firefox, a windowing environment, and a kernel into 50 MiB while today the standard vim install is 33 MiB...

*it used Xvesa, not Xfree86.

Alpine doesn't use a 2.4 kernel.

(In all seriousness, I am curious as well.)

I mean, the project kinda died in the 2008 timeframe...