It was designed to run graphical user interface applications on older PC hardware, for example, machines with 486 and early Pentium microprocessors and very little random-access memory (RAM).

What originally began as an experiment to see how much software could fit in 50 MB eventually became a full Linux distribution.

For five years the community included Robert Shingledecker who created the MyDSL system, DSL Control Panel and other features.

DSL has been demonstrated by browsing the web with Dillo, running simple games, and playing music on systems with a 486 processor and 16 MB of RAM.

The system requirements are higher for running Mozilla Firefox and optional add-ons such as the OpenOffice.org office suite.

Automatic hardware detection may fail, or the user may want to use something other than the default settings (language, keyboard, VGA, fail-safe graphics, text mode...).

MyDSL is handled and maintained mostly by Robert Shingledecker and hosted by many organizations, such as ibiblio and Belgium's BELNET.

The regular area contains extensions that have been proven stable enough for everyday use and is broken down into different areas such as apps, net, system, and uci (Universal Compressed ISO - Extensions in .uci format are mounted as a separate file system to minimize RAM use).

X-DSL has a Fluxbox desktop, with programs for E-mail, web browsing, word processing and playing music.