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Add to SafariWhen comparing Google's Web Starter Kit vs TinyCore, the Slant community recommends TinyCore for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux distros that run entirely in RAM?” TinyCore is ranked 9th while Google's Web Starter Kit is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose TinyCore is:
Can be as small as about 9MB, and with even X, wireless modules, and more, it takes up only 72MB.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Sass support
Since a lot of web designers these days don't use the plain old CSS, instead they use a CSS pre-processor (like Sass or Less). Thanks to Sass support web designers can easily add GWK to their workflows.
Pro CSS vendor autoprefixing
Starter Kit includes Autoprefixer that takes care of vendor prefixes.
Pro High PageSpeed Insights performance score
Since the base skeleton provided by the Web Starter kit is authored by Google itself, it's pretty much understood that the template is optimized to the max, for performance. If you test a site (on Google PageSpeed Insights) built by the GWK you can be sure that it'll always achieve a very high score.
Pro Responsive
Since most of the websites that are currently being built (or any website that was built after 2012) are responsive, a 'scaffold-ed' website skeleton without any responsiveness would be pretty useless.
Pro Live browser reloading
Helps to build website faster by refreshing the page automatically as you save the source file changes.
Pro Performance optimization
Gulp script includes tools for image optimization, JavaScript & CSS minification & optimization and HTML minification.
Pro Built-in HTTP server
In case you want to try out your shiny new site on your mobile phone or another PC. Just type in the command gulp serve and load up the provided server address from another device to see how your website looks and performs.
Pro Google-friendly style guide
Pro Includes a gulp build script
If you use the Gulp build system and are familiar with its environment, you can directly use Web Starter Kit's Gulp build script to build your next GWK based project.
Pro BrowserSync for synchronized browser testing
BrowserSync offers a browser live-update solution across multiple devices. And it works with basically every desktop and mobile browser. Even IE7.
Pro Yeoman generator
There's a Yeoman generator for Google's Web Starter Kit available. To install (requires Node, Ruby, Gulp, and Sass):
sudo npm install -g yo generator-web-starter-kit
cd project-root-directory/
yo web-starter-kit
npm install
gulp serve
Pro VERY small
Can be as small as about 9MB, and with even X, wireless modules, and more, it takes up only 72MB.
Pro Surprisingly customizable
Fluxbox window manager is especially slick looking all considered, and the options one gets with it's toolbar, app bar, and wallpaper are surprisingly complex for such a small distro.
Pro Use of tcz packages stored on media outside of MyData
Cons
Con Deprecated
Visitors to the official docs will see a warning: "Warning: Web Starter Kit is no longer supported."
Con Can't be used with Less
The framework CSS is built on Sass, which adds dependencies to the build chain. There's no option to use Less.
Con Rather poor documentation
Con Not visually appealing
The operating system is not very pretty.
Con Can be somewhat slow to turn on
Once it is up and going it is unrivaled in speed, but it can be sluggish when it comes to turning on, restarting, or turning off.
