Either pxe netboot or usb or installable. Immuttable or not. Ramfs. With a host selector or fully auto login ?
Ultra light 16 to 128mb storage 64-128mb ram. Or “full sized”
And lastly, something like that, but that would run on a proxmox host.
You could throw something together with Alpine Linux
You can’t display things and run in a low memory footprint. That’s not how it works as you need a buffer.
What are you trying to do? You could build a custom image but that it likely harder than you need.
It’s probably plenty for vnc or spice though. I had a 486 with 8mb of video RAM that could do 1024x748 display resolutions…
Megabytes, a thousand of which make a gigabyte. Chrome in my machine right now is taking over one gigabyte of memory, that alone is using more than 8 times what OP wants the whole system to. It’s definitely an ask for low memory, almost embedded levels of ram.
Chrome is actually doing a lot of work to display modern webpages though. A thin client only needs to receive a video stream and send inputs to a server. That can be done with an extremely low memory footprint. The Steam Link only had 512MB of RAM and it actually ran a steam client (which contains embedded chromium) instead of acting as a pure thin client.
I’ve been using crunchbang++ on a Dell wyse thin client laptop. It doesn’t auto login or anything but seem to work fine I got it on woot for 60 buckd
Porteus kiosk thin client might be an option.