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Welcome to Skinux! In case you were wondering, Skinux is a contraction of Skinny Linux. It's been an idea of mine for a long time to have an extremely minimal Linux installation and run absolutely everything possible in virtual machines. Since I had that idea Qubes OS has come along, which is a fairly complete realisation of my vision using the Xen hypervisor system.
I'll be doing a lot more in this area with Linux containers, possibly in the form of systemd-nspawn as it's built into almost all distributions today. This would provide me with a similar setup to Qubes OS but it would be much more lightweight as there's no virtual machine overhead.
But in the meantime this is my attempt at the most minimal graphical Linux system possible — using a well-established distribution, as opposed to opting for Alpine or something similarly limited — on top of which I can start to build containers for the packages I want to add to the system.
It's an experiment in isolation, keeping a base system in as pristine a state as possible while allowing the installation of software that would normally modify your base system with its various support files and configurations, not to mention its dependencies.
For my minimalist efforts here I have chosen to use Arch Linux. Arch Linux bills itself as
a lightweight and flexible Linux® distribution that tries to Keep It Simple.
Lightweight and flexible, yes. In spades. Simple? Not so much. But they can get away with saying that by defining simplicity as "without unnecessary additions or modifications". Arch is a Linux distribution that doesn't hold your hand except by way of extensive documentation. It has many advantages, amongst which are the complete lack of bloatware and the rolling release model. You will never have to upgrade to a new version of Arch: simply execute pacman -Syu on occasion to update any software that has been modified since the last invocation of that command. Likewise, you'll never have software on your system that you didn't put there yourself.
Eventually there will be a fair number of pages on this wiki. For instructions on how to install Skinux to various media, please refer to the pages with titles that start with Install to. At the time of writing there is only one: