When comparing TinyCore vs Lubuntu, the Slant community recommends TinyCore for most people. In the question“What are the best lightweight Linux distributions?” TinyCore is ranked 11th while Lubuntu is ranked 13th. 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.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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
Pro Part of the Ubuntu family
Being based on Ubuntu (which itself is based on Debian), there's a good amount of information and support to be found when searching for it, both on Lubuntu specifically and Ubuntu that also applies to Lubuntu. It also means that there are certain security and usability standards enforced and you can use Ubuntu .deb packages.
Pro Lightweight
By utilizing minimal software Lubuntu is able to use less resources and power.
Pro Stable
Pro LXDE desktop
Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment performs fast and conserves resources.
Pro Offers a long term support release
Lubuntu offers a long term support release with their 14.04 Trusty Tahr based version.
Pro Uses Openbox as the default window manager
Lubuntu (LXDE) uses the lightweight Openbox window manager to manage its windows. By using Openbox by default LXDE is able to remain lightweight as there is no built in composite manager in Openbox to take up resources.
Cons
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.
Con No composite manager
Being a modern desktop many users expect compositing, even on lightweight systems. Without compositing there will be screen tearing, a lot of it. Though there is built in support for users to add their own compositors such as Compton.
Con Long term support not as long as other Ubuntu spins
Lubuntu has not always had LTS support. Luckily they do offer a 3 year LTS now but it is shorter than other Ubuntu spins that receive a full 5 years of support.
Con Clock in panel is broken currently in LXDE
The clock panel applet does not work as expected in the newest versions of LXDE. If the clock is set to not show seconds in the display when waking from suspend the clock will not update until the time actually changes in the applet which means it can take up to a minute for the clock to update when seconds are not shown. The work around to this is to display seconds on the clock which allows it to update after suspend within one second. Sadly the clock does not display seconds correctly as it skips them by one to three at least once a minute, often more.
This is also not the first time there have been problems with the panel clock which clearly illustrates this to be an ongoing problem for the developers.
Con Lacks some window management features
There's no built-in way to snap windows to the sides, re-size them by double clicking the bar, or dragging to the edges.
Con Redundant
There is absolutely no reason to install it, since it uses the same package repositories as Ubuntu and you can transform any Ubuntu install into a Lubuntu install.