12 ms·

200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop

197 points by vermaden 9mo ago

Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
If someone wants really low ram consumption for a desktop. They should try out tinycorelinux which I have ran the whole system in <25/20 MB of ram from its most minimal option. It's truly the most minimalist gui option just out there. It uses flwm & there own iirc very minimalist xorg server but most apps usually work The one issue I have is that I can't copy paste text or do some simple stuff like moving my mouse on some text but aside from that, Tinycorelinux's pretty good
- hun3 9mo ago
  The size feels like you can almost fit it in a L3 Cache-As-RAM
- eth0up 9mo ago
  Can your "one issue" be tweaked by adding more RAM and allocating it thusly? I'm using Void with 24gb ddr5 and frequently get system freezes during high productivity. Browser tabs in the background are often contributors, but working with openshot or odb crashes often. I have several old nuc's and I might try tinycore on one. What do you or most others use it for, primarily?
  - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
    I am not sure how my one issue can be fixed. It seems to be fundamentally an issue of their minimalist xorg server itself but I am pretty sure that there must be a way > I'm using Void with 24gb ddr5 and frequently get system freezes during high productivity. Browser tabs in the background are often contributors, but working with openshot or odb crashes often. Kdenlive's' pretty good for what its worth and I use Archlinux/cachy on an 8 gig system and browser tabs aren't that often atleast in here > I have several old nuc's and I might try tinycore on one. What do you or most others use it for, primarily? I used it to revive my 15 year old laptop and even ran complete modern firefox on it (its specs are 1 gigs 32 bit ram simple mini laptop) and ran wifi and ran firefox and ran pomodorokitty on it and I can sort of treat it as a second monitor It's battery is removable so I am gonna change its battery as currently the setup takes time to install and I have to install it everytime I open/it shuts down which can happen quite a lot if I don't have it plugged in so currently its shutdown for over a month but I really liked the tinkering I did with when I ran pomodorokitty on it
    - fenykep 9mo ago
      I'm not sure if I understood your issue correctly but you can persist your configuration with all diskless (os is entirely in RAM) OSs as far as I know. This way you wouldn't have to install the setup after every reboot. Here is the guide for tinycore: https://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/doku.php?id=wiki:persistence_for_dummies https://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/doku.php?id=wiki:persistence_...
      - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
        Ah yes sorry forgot about persistence since I played with it some long time ago and the details were blurry yes I probably could do that and most likely would on the laptop but I really wanted to tinker with tinycore a lot first so I was using the non persistence mode I will probably do it later when I replace my old mini laptop's battery with a new (I think it costs less than a $ or so I have heard) but the procastination aspect is gonna have me do it to find a good shop around me to have the part etc. to probably and I am thinking of doing it after a few months but the mini laptop's still in my room :) (all be it off)
  - zozbot234 9mo ago
    If the system totally freezes such that you can't even ssh in, that's just flaky hardware and you should replace it.
    - eth0up 9mo ago
      It's a newer Lenovo vpro, not because I wanted that, but because it's what I got. It came with 16g of reputable ram, then I added 8g ~1 year ago for $20, the exact same module which is now $120. Orher than a bad ram chip, what else would be the culprit?
      - duffyjp 9mo ago
        I have 64gb in my linux machine and have managed to hardlock it a bunch of times exhausting the ram. Couldn't even REISUB a couple of times. The OOM killer stuff in Linux just doesn't work anymore by what I can gather. Buying more ram is no longer an option, so I added a 128gb swap partition on nvme. I incorrectly assumed with 64gb I didn't even need swap. No crashes since. If you don't want to move partitions around, you can add a swap file. ChatGPT or whatever can give instructions.
        dizhn 9mo ago
        You should consider some sort of swap on ram like zswap rather than thrashing your nvme.
        eth0up 9mo ago
        Not parent, but noted. Thanks!
        dizhn 9mo ago
        :)
        duffyjp 9mo ago
        Thanks, yep I do have zram installed, but I'm working with mostly incompressible AI models so it really didn't help. I set it to cap at 8GB so random stuff can take advantage and I guess it helps a tiny bit, but not much. I have a free m.2 slot and may get a cheap optane drive and use that as SWAP. I've read they're not as fast as marketed for this, but at least I wouldn't have to worry about about wearing out my SSD.
  - knowitnone3 9mo ago
    I've used it for mostly system rescue operations but it can do much more. Look at the package list for possibilities.
- al_borland 9mo ago
  I put tinycorelinux on an old laptop a family member was looking to get rid of. It was the only OS I could find that still supported the ancient cpu. It worked ok, but had a bit of a learning curve. I also had to run a couple commands every time I booted it up if I wanted to connect to wifi. I tried to get this to happen automatically, but wasn't having much luck. The password for the network also gets stored in plain text, so there was that. I didn't spend too much time on it, since it seemed like it was ultimately headed for the recycle bin and they just wanted to make sure none of their data was there, but thought if it worked decently well, maybe it could still be kept around and used.
  - user3939382 9mo ago
    NetBSD + xfce is also decent in this scenario
    - entropicdrifter 9mo ago
      I prefer LXQt, uses significantly less RAM than xfce
- kevin_thibedeau 9mo ago
  > The one issue I have is that I can't copy paste text With pure X11 you copy paste via primary selection and middle click.
  - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
    Hmm I have always been in the wayland world (KDE,Hyprland etc.) but I have been on xfce in mxlinux and I didn't need to do primary selection & middle click I don't know if tinycore supports this. This was my biggest grievance because I had to create tmp files paste into it and then cat into it or something to work with this pain (which I feel like is pretty fixable/ maybe a skill issue from my side and honestly wishing for me to learn how to fix it)
- knowitnone3 9mo ago
  that one issue sounds like a deal breaker to me. I mean, I copy and paste all the time. The one thing I wish tc would do is have a searchable package like most distros do instead of providing a large text file of all packages. Shouldn't be too hard to implement but whatever.
  - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
    I mean fzf might help?
werdl 9mo ago
[flagged]
- heraldgeezer 9mo ago
  For us not in the know, why is this bad?
  - desdenova 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    - BSDobelix 9mo ago
      Please help me, Lunduke (who is a Jew) likes a project that is "nazi"? Or is it maybe that people who call everyone a "nazi" who they disagree the real one's? Stop degrading that word (to make common and without any weight) and use it for you crippled worldview.
      - snvzz 9mo ago
        These days, the label is being used to signal the labeled person is a target for violence[0]. Horrible. 0. https://world.hey.com/dhh/calling-someone-a-nazi-is-a-permission-slip-for-violence-4bfbbb82 https://world.hey.com/dhh/calling-someone-a-nazi-is-a-permis...
        deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
  - t-3 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    - gambiting 9mo ago
      What's CoC in this context?
joecool1029 9mo ago
Woulda been a nice article if it covered the real reason xlibre’s founder got fired from RH, Enrico’s had a long history of pissing people off and posting cringe on main: https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/11/linus_torvalds_vaccine_smackdown/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/11/linus_torvalds_vaccin...
- bboozzoo 9mo ago
  Why should I care though?
  - Mashimo 9mo ago
    Could say the same thing about why it's in the blog post. You don't have to care at all. It's just an odd blog post that just from technical intro to rant about DEI and censorship and back to technical details. And joecool1029 just provides more context to what was said in the blog post.
- Mashimo 9mo ago
  Odd little rant suddenly appears in the middle of it :D Here is how I set up minimal Desktop, WATCH 4 VIDEOS ABOUT HOW DEI IS KILLING OPEN SOURCE PROJECTS, and here is my loader.conf ...
- anthk 9mo ago
  Indeed. Xenocara would be a better bet. But the more these people have to collaborate with different people, the more empathy they will need. https://git.sr.ht/~rabbits/fashware https://git.sr.ht/~rabbits/fashware About Nemo (Fran J. Ballesteros from plan9/9front) he has half as encuse as he grew up (for sure) under the Francoist regime probably from the loaded family side, and, thus, he had to swallow tons of literal extreme right wing ideology even at school (Franco's regime). But the point on being a conspiranoid about the Covid... I would expect more sanity from the mindset from a guy perfectly abled in algoritmics, math and by proxy, science. Echo chambers create these kinds of idiots even on really smart people (the far right in Spain used cult like mechanics too), and I'm sure Fran changed a bit over time for the better. On the Cosmopolitan/APE person, I remind you that if you want to get back to Reissanance times, I'm a Spaniard, and thus, your whole ideology pales against the Iberian Humanism from the School of Salamanca, where at the time we were the Enlightened ones and you were just a bunch of WASP uneducated hicks living in filthy villages in the middle of Europe. Back to 9intro, even if you dislike ~nemo, 9intro it's still worth to learn programming on 9front, it's a great book to share and learn from. If would be a waste to ditch it just because some old fart doesn't get into the times. EDIT: ok, now I see ~nemo it's not that old, so a plausible indoctrination from the Francoism wouldn't apply there; but I'm pretty sure being a conspiranoid on Covid doesn't look like the normal socialization out there.
mono442 9mo ago
At the end of the post there is a comparison of ram usage of different desktop environments and the used ram is reported differently by every tool. So what exactly is being here measured as the used ram?
OsrsNeedsf2P 9mo ago
While this is cool, it all goes out the window the minute you run any app
- janmalec 9mo ago
  Exactly. The issue today is that even if you optimize your OS and DE to be very memory efficient, it matters very little as soon as you open a modern web browser. And without a modern web browser a big part of the online experience is broken.
  - bandrami 9mo ago
    Beautifully, blissfully broken
  - creshal 9mo ago
    Eh, kinda. Work forces me to have Jira, Confluence, Gitlab, Copilot, the other Copilot formerly known as Outlook, the other other Copilot formerly known as Teams, as well as Slack of course, and a dozen other webslop apps open… and it still all fits in <8GB RAM. Which is a lot worse than the <1GB you'd get with well-optimized native tools, but try running Win11 with "only" 8GB RAM.
    - mghackerlady 9mo ago
      I'm convinced the next windows GUI will just be an electron app that runs copilot as the desktop, forcing you to argue with it to open a file or run a program. Doesn't even have titlebars or window buttons or a task bar, just one big copilot bar at the bottom that you can ask whats already running or to close an app. All of this written in JavaScript of course
  - eikenberry 9mo ago
    Aren't you optimizing your OS/DE to be memory efficient in order to use that memory for other things (like more web browser tabs)?
    - 9mo ago
badc0ffee 9mo ago
I remember booting up Debian into an X11 session on a laptop with only 8 MB of RAM. (This would have been circa 2000, and I think I had to try a few different distros before finding one that worked. Also I don't think I did anything with it beyond Xterm and Xeyes.)
- hnlmorg 9mo ago
  I doesn’t feel like that long ago when I built a swarm of Arch Linux based thin clients which PXE booted from a SLES DHCP & NFS host. That was probably around 2010 or 2015. Those images had to run on a thin client with 512 MB RAM. I think I chose XFCE as the DE.
  - forinti 9mo ago
    In college we had a network of Sun workstations and some of the machines had only 8MB of RAM, IIRC. This was in the 90s. Then again, the X desktop was really minimal and I would use them mostly to code in C using a terminal.
- hsbauauvhabzb 9mo ago
  I don’t know how resolution maps to ram in x11 but I assume at least one byte per pixel. Based on that assumption, there’s no chance you’d even be able to power a 4k monitor with 8mb of ram, let alone the rest of the system.
  - argsnd 9mo ago
    Presumably every pixel is 32 bits rather than just 8. So the count starts at 33.2MB just for the display.
    - stavros 9mo ago
      It is now, but back then it was 1 byte, with typical resolutions being 800x600. There were high-color modes but for a period it was rare to have good enough hardware for it.
giamma 9mo ago
It used to be like that, computer had limited resources and desktop environments were light. Then at some point RAM became less and less of an issue, and everything started to get bigger and less efficient. Coyuld anyone summarize why a desktop Windows/MacOs now needs so much more RAM than in the past? is it the UI animations, color themes, shades etc etc or is it the underlying operating system that has more and more features, services etc etc ? I believe it's the desktop environment that is greedy, because one can easily run a linux server on a raspberry pi with very limited RAM, but is it really the case?
- roywashere 9mo ago
  I am wondering if, with memory and storage prices skyrocketing, there will be more effort on making computing use less resources?
  - t-3 9mo ago
    Unlikely. If you can't afford RAM, how can you afford the SaaS contracts that keep devs employed?
- flohofwoe 9mo ago
  > is it the UI animations, color themes, shades etc etc or is it the underlying operating system that has more and more features, services etc etc ? ...all of those and more? New software is only optimized until it is not outright annoying to use on current hardware, it's always been like that and that's why there are old jokes like: "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away." "Software is like a gas, it expands to consume all available hardware resources." "Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster" ...etc..etc... variations of those "laws" are as old as computing. Sometimes there are short periods where the hardware pulls a little bit ahead for a few short years of bliss (for instance the ARM Macs), but the software quickly catches up and soon everything feels as slow as always (or worse). That also means that the easiest way to a slick computing experience is to run old software on new hardware ;)
  - creshal 9mo ago
ryan-c 9mo ago
opens blog post sees lunduke closes blog post
- heraldgeezer 9mo ago
  For us not in the know, why is this bad? Is he ""bigoted"" ? :(
  - Mashimo 9mo ago
    I have no idea who he is, never heard of him. You shall not judge a book by its cover but .. he is making it hard. His video titles are: * Devuan: The Non-Woke Debian Linux Fork (Without Systemd) * NeoFetch But in Rust and More Gay * Chimera Linux is "Here to Further Woke Agenda by Turning Free Software Gay" * Are Jews the Cause of DEI in Big Tech? Yeah .. I did not watch a single video of his. But just from a short few seconds It's not anything I want to invest time in to see if he has a point or not. Life is too short.
    - bigpeopleareold 9mo ago
      Whatever I might agree or disagree with, this is annoying to look at, but his stuff keeps coming up in my YouTube feed. Even it looks slightly interesting, I know it will be some rant involved about a thing not related to technology, but some developer's personal opinions on non-tech ideas. I get it - people are horrible! Sheesh! FWIW, probably not much, he said he had a Jewish background ... in, like, the one video I watched and eventually gave up on.
      - FrostViper8 9mo ago
        You can just mute/hide a channel from your feed permanently.
    - hsbauauvhabzb 9mo ago
      > NeoFetch But in Rust and More Gay apt-install --fuck-yes gay-rust-neofetch I’ll look to migrate to chimera shortly, but only if it includes gay neofetch.
heraldgeezer 9mo ago
Cant wait to boot up my Windows 11 total bloat machine at home and work I kinda wanna try linux again...
- undeveloper 9mo ago
  it gets better every day
inatreecrown2 9mo ago
Running Alpine Linux with a minimal window manager gives me similar RAM usage, about 150MB
- sunshine-o 9mo ago
  This is quite good ! My Alpine Desktop (Root on ZFS, Wayland/Sway) starts with about 550MB
  - lproven 9mo ago
    Ye gods, that's a lot. I run Xfce on Alpine on plain old ext4 and get 200MB or so used.
fredsted 9mo ago
Cool post. So much could be done on a couple hundred megabytes of ram back in the day, with spinning rust as storage to boot!
znpy 9mo ago
nice, now open a web browser and any modern website /s
- gambiting 9mo ago
  I'm sure Lynx would be fine.
  - Mashimo 9mo ago
    Been over a decade since I used a terminal browser, how do they handle modern websites with javascript?
    - gambiting 9mo ago
      They don't. Javascript is completely unsupported.
- themafia 9mo ago
  It should run very quickly given that there are few things competing with it for resources like CPU cache space. It's like "your car is going to get dirty why even wash it?"
- vermaden 9mo ago
  If you want to stay low on resources you can use Netsurf. I just started it and loading my https://vermaden.wordpress.com/ https://vermaden.wordpress.com/ page used 86 MB of RAM - a lot less then Firefox or Chrome.
- snvzz 9mo ago
  frogfind can be quite helpful.
solaris2007 9mo ago
A long time ago the power supply blew out in the machine I played Counter Strike: Source on and I was a teenager just barely 16 with no money so I couldn't replace it. I was able to keep in touch with my drug dealers and my girlfriend's friends (who were also all super hot) which was very important to me at that age, in an environment where you really needed a car or people who had cars to do anything with anyone worth doing anything with. I got OpenSolaris booted on a Pentium II box that had 384mb of RAM then ran Openbox and a communications suite of SILC, IRC, Pidgin, Finch (a text frontend to libpurple), and some XMPP+OTR clients -- all in Solaris Zones to not get my shit wrecked by the same RCE exploits I was using against other Pidgin users (which seemed to be as numerous as exploits for the official AIM client). This was before Facebook. Solaris Zones gave me that feeling of power over software that Qubes enthusiasts like to talk about, similar dopamine+endorphin flow to being a military dictator of a 3rd world country. Shit was so cash. Thanks to Unix' elegance, I still had a life until moved enough herb to assemble another box I could run Counter Strike: Source (on FreeBSD, Cedega for the win) on.
- la6776 9mo ago
  Thanks for letting all these nerds on HN know how important it was to maintain contact with a drug dealer and super hot girls when you were a hip teenager, I mean... i totally get it because I was also a really cool hip teenager. Did we just become best friends?
  - solaris2007 9mo ago
    Think of the gravity that Instagram/Facebook has today, or maybe things are different today, so had for millennials. Try to take away a young adult's phone today, you'll risk being eliminated. We had some neat handhelds with PCMCIA slots that OpenBSD ran on in those days but it was only the kids in "rich" neighborhoods that also had them and I was a year behind in getting those. The critical mass of the network effect at that time was on desktops and iBooks. > super hot girls Yeah a San Francisco 7 was like an 8 in Los Angeles and easily a 10 in most towns (in those days). They were prowling MySpace just as much as anyone else. You know what they're up to.
- 9mo ago
virajk_31 9mo ago
Yes, 200MB RAM without any non-essential apps (not really useful unless for a specific use case).
igtztorrero 9mo ago
It says: that uses 217 MB RAM with Devuan, and Devuan is a fork of Debian13
scrapheap 9mo ago
200MB for a desktop sounds massive to some of us :D Back in the day I used to have a desktop running, with applications, in just 512KB. Getting that memory upgrade to a full 1MB was amazing.
- kiwijamo 9mo ago
  I used to run Acorn's RISC OS in just 2MB of RAM.
  - lproven 9mo ago
    I ran it in 1MB. :-) And it was fast and responsive, too. Soon afterwards I bought a Psion 3 which ran a multitasking GUI OS on an 8086 in 256 kB of RAM. That space was shared with file storage in a RAMdisc. https://phonedb.net/index.php?m=device&id=826&c=psion_series_3&d=detailed_specs https://phonedb.net/index.php?m=device&id=826&c=psion_series... It was perfectly viable to have multiple apps open and flip between them. It ran for weeks on a pair of AA batteries.
- _joel 9mo ago
  Yup, fond memories of my Amiga 500+ (full meg, woo!)
  - pjmlp 9mo ago
    And for many scenarios people use their computers for, it would still be enough today.
  - TheAmazingRace 9mo ago
    Or the Atari ST! I have one at home with 1 MB of RAM in it and it still flies. Boots up in less than a few seconds, which is faster than any of my modern PCs.
  - snvzz 9mo ago
    Of chip RAM, too!
dTal 9mo ago
I remember, in 2007, running FreeBSD on a desktop with 512MB RAM and only using 64MB of it running full GNOME 2 and a running instance of Firefox with a couple tabs. A totally standard desktop experience. Even better, my laptop at the time had only 128MB of RAM and ran Windows XP - a supported, albeit minimal, configuration. XP was bloatier than FreeBSD of course, and ran correspondingly less well, but replacing explorer.exe with a shell called "blackbox" - an openbox-alike - and carefully curating applications (e.g. K-Meleon instead of Firefox) rendered it a perfectly viable multitasking desktop. I have a screenshot from that machine showing an AIM window, an mp3 player, an IDE for an embedded system, and a web browser with the documentation open for that IDE, all running comfortably (on one of its several desktops - yes you could have multiple desktops on XP with alternative shells such as blackbox). Computers now require approximately 30x the RAM to achieve similar levels of "barely viable" performance - 4GB is considered the absolute minimum for general purpose desktop viability. And qualitatively speaking, what do they do now, that my 2007 fleet did not do? It is difficult to say. One is led to the conclusion that something has gone terribly awry with resource consumption.
- alyandon 9mo ago
  It's the web browser and electron based apps that are the primary consumers of ram on my desktops with the DE and OS ram usage being minimal by comparison. I have an ancient laptop from 2008 with 4GB of ram that runs a modern KDE desktop and related applications just fine that I use for troubleshooting stuff. However, the moment I open a web browser it basically falls to pieces. I hate everything about this. :-/
  - ValdikSS 9mo ago
    That's easy to fix: Step 1: sudo tee /etc/tmpfiles.d/mglru.conf <<EOF w- /sys/kernel/mm/lru_gen/enabled - - - - y w- /sys/kernel/mm/lru_gen/min_ttl_ms - - - - 300 EOF Step 2: apt install zram-tools sed -i 's/#PERCENT=.*/PERCENT=130/' /etc/default/zramswap
    - 9mo ago
Fnoord 9mo ago
I used to run KDE and GNOME on a computer with 256 MB RAM back around the year 2000. Athlon 1000 Sempron and a Duron 800 (one of these machines started out with 128 MB RAM). KDE 1.x, 2.x, GNOME 1.x, 2.x. I don't remember the very minor versions. I tried a myriad of Linux distributions, and FreeBSD as well. I settled for Debian. Back then, we (me, friends, family, etc.) thought these DE's were very bloated. I remember KDE 1.x very vividly because I had to compile it myself (or look online for binaries), and I digged the CDE theme. The first lightweight DE (if you discount fvwm) I used on Linux was XFce, but that was later on. I pretty much started with KDE, tried a bit of GNOME, went back to KDE (I came from Windows 9x). In the end, I learned to appreciate GNOME, and MacOSX or Mac OSX as I used to call it back then (proper name was Mac OS X, I suppose). My point is what you are used to is your reference point. The underlying OS isn't super relevant. On Linux, every distribution gets on par with each other eventually. On FreeBSD I used OSS and something like winmodem is just crap hardware. Nowadays my homelab and desktop have 64 GB RAM, while my MBP (M1Pro) only has 16 GB RAM which is the same as its successor (MBP 2015 with 16 GB RAM). Do I use all of that? Not really, but the main culprit is browser(s) (which includes apps these days). Curious if you can play Steam games well on FreeBSD. FreeBSD has a couple of neat things (tho ZFS is now better on Linux). I've always preferred PF to IPT.
- ronjakoi 9mo ago
  I used to run Gnome on 8 MB in the late 90s
LeoNatan25 9mo ago
[flagged]
pmdr 9mo ago
The future of computing, now that @sama is gobbling up all the RAM.
js-j 9mo ago
Consider the Sharp Zaurus (SL-C860, for example): - Intel Xscale PXA255 400 MHz - 64 MB SDRAM - Linux/QTopia desktop environment
ruslan 9mo ago
When I was watching that Lunduke's video a couple of days ago initially I was thinking he's just making a joke of that Vendefoul Wolf distro on 200MB box. I recalled using FreeBSD as access server with lots of modems (PPP/SLIP), Apache, Samba and QuakeWorld server running on a box with just 32MB of RAM. That was also my daily working machine with XF86 and Enlightenment desktop manager, circa 2000. So, 200MB is a whole lot of memory!
lostmsu 9mo ago
Just to remind people here: a single uncompressed "4k" picture is 33MB. Have your compositor hold 10 of them and you get 330MB just for the window images. Across multiple monitors my desktop is 6400x2160, which at 32 bits comes to 55MB. Considering memory is slow and GPU compute these days is cheap maybe it would make sense to relayout and rerender things each frame directly into screen buffer instead of keeping the window surface buffers resident. That would require rewriting quite a lot of things though.
- zozbot234 9mo ago
  You need window surface buffers in order to do seamless compositing, scaling etc. It's quite technically possible to achieve pixel-perfect 2D rendering with GPU-side compute, but in many ways it's still an open problem.
  - lostmsu 9mo ago
    Scaling is for legacy apps, right? Modern apps should get the area to render and the desired pixel density. Not sure what you mean specifically by "need" in "need ... to do compositing". Compositing is just a way (e.g. rerender only on changes, cache results) of running a desktop environment. Strictly speaking you don't need compositing, you can just use immediate mode across the DE and apps. The tradeoff of course is that if an app is lagging you get a blank rectangle instead of a frozen picture. Well not quite 0 or 1. You can cache lowres and/or compressed frozen picture periodically to improve UX.
    - zozbot234 9mo ago
      > Modern apps should get the area to render and the desired pixel density. What if you want to smoothly slide an app window over to a second monitor with a different pixel density? That's admittedly a very rare thing, but some people seem to be obsessed with it and insist that it must work. You either have to compose some window surface, or just use clean vector rendering throughout.
      - 9mo ago
wormius 9mo ago
"Redskirts" hahaha you are so funny and clever. Let me say something you kinda guys like to hear: "Keep your social bullshit politics out of my tech stories"
aktau 9mo ago
I still have some screenshots in my GitHub repository of what my ArchLinux with AwesomeWM (X11) looked like in 2009. Those screenshots also contain the RSS, as luck would have it. 34MiB when on the desktop (clean), running X.org, AwesomeWM and xcompmgr (for compositing). Screenshot: https://github.com/aktau/awesome/blob/master/screenshots/2009-07-27-105211_1280x800_scrot.png https://github.com/aktau/awesome/blob/master/screenshots/200... 57MiB with a couple of applications open. From memory: urxvt running htop, thunar (XFCE file manager) and the Mirage image viewer (which is Python, not otherwise known for efficiency). Screenshot: https://github.com/aktau/awesome/blob/master/screenshots/2009-07-19-213545_1280x800_scrot.png https://github.com/aktau/awesome/blob/master/screenshots/200... Nowadays, even with a tiling WM that's supposed to be lightweight (say: Sway), the minimum appears to be well over 300MiB (see https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1njecy5/wayland_compositors_ram_usage_comparison/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1njecy5/wayland_comp...). GNOME 49 takes up around 1GiB last time I tried it (NixOS). Interestingly https://www.reddit.com/r/swaywm/comments/oghner/how_does_the_resource_usage_of_sway_compare_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/swaywm/comments/oghner/how_does_the... from 5 years ago mentions Sway only using 115MiB. What happened? Theories I have: - 32-bit to 64-bit means all points are double the size. That would account for something. - Wayland vs X11. I should compare Sway versus X.org+i3. - General library and system daemon bloat.

197 points by vermaden 9mo ago

If someone wants really low ram consumption for a desktop. They should try out tinycorelinux which I have ran the whole system in <25/20 MB of ram from its most minimal option. It's truly the most minimalist gui option just out there. It uses flwm & there own iirc very minimalist xorg server but most apps usually work The one issue I have is that I can't copy paste text or do some simple stuff like moving my mouse on some text but aside from that, Tinycorelinux's pretty good

hun3 9mo ago
The size feels like you can almost fit it in a L3 Cache-As-RAM
eth0up 9mo ago
Can your "one issue" be tweaked by adding more RAM and allocating it thusly? I'm using Void with 24gb ddr5 and frequently get system freezes during high productivity. Browser tabs in the background are often contributors, but working with openshot or odb crashes often. I have several old nuc's and I might try tinycore on one. What do you or most others use it for, primarily?
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
  I am not sure how my one issue can be fixed. It seems to be fundamentally an issue of their minimalist xorg server itself but I am pretty sure that there must be a way > I'm using Void with 24gb ddr5 and frequently get system freezes during high productivity. Browser tabs in the background are often contributors, but working with openshot or odb crashes often. Kdenlive's' pretty good for what its worth and I use Archlinux/cachy on an 8 gig system and browser tabs aren't that often atleast in here > I have several old nuc's and I might try tinycore on one. What do you or most others use it for, primarily? I used it to revive my 15 year old laptop and even ran complete modern firefox on it (its specs are 1 gigs 32 bit ram simple mini laptop) and ran wifi and ran firefox and ran pomodorokitty on it and I can sort of treat it as a second monitor It's battery is removable so I am gonna change its battery as currently the setup takes time to install and I have to install it everytime I open/it shuts down which can happen quite a lot if I don't have it plugged in so currently its shutdown for over a month but I really liked the tinkering I did with when I ran pomodorokitty on it
  - fenykep 9mo ago
    I'm not sure if I understood your issue correctly but you can persist your configuration with all diskless (os is entirely in RAM) OSs as far as I know. This way you wouldn't have to install the setup after every reboot. Here is the guide for tinycore: https://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/doku.php?id=wiki:persistence_for_dummies https://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/doku.php?id=wiki:persistence_...
    - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
      Ah yes sorry forgot about persistence since I played with it some long time ago and the details were blurry yes I probably could do that and most likely would on the laptop but I really wanted to tinker with tinycore a lot first so I was using the non persistence mode I will probably do it later when I replace my old mini laptop's battery with a new (I think it costs less than a $ or so I have heard) but the procastination aspect is gonna have me do it to find a good shop around me to have the part etc. to probably and I am thinking of doing it after a few months but the mini laptop's still in my room :) (all be it off)
- zozbot234 9mo ago
  If the system totally freezes such that you can't even ssh in, that's just flaky hardware and you should replace it.
  - eth0up 9mo ago
    It's a newer Lenovo vpro, not because I wanted that, but because it's what I got. It came with 16g of reputable ram, then I added 8g ~1 year ago for $20, the exact same module which is now $120. Orher than a bad ram chip, what else would be the culprit?
    - duffyjp 9mo ago
      I have 64gb in my linux machine and have managed to hardlock it a bunch of times exhausting the ram. Couldn't even REISUB a couple of times. The OOM killer stuff in Linux just doesn't work anymore by what I can gather. Buying more ram is no longer an option, so I added a 128gb swap partition on nvme. I incorrectly assumed with 64gb I didn't even need swap. No crashes since. If you don't want to move partitions around, you can add a swap file. ChatGPT or whatever can give instructions.
      - dizhn 9mo ago
        You should consider some sort of swap on ram like zswap rather than thrashing your nvme.
        eth0up 9mo ago
        Not parent, but noted. Thanks!
        dizhn 9mo ago
        :)
        duffyjp 9mo ago
        Thanks, yep I do have zram installed, but I'm working with mostly incompressible AI models so it really didn't help. I set it to cap at 8GB so random stuff can take advantage and I guess it helps a tiny bit, but not much. I have a free m.2 slot and may get a cheap optane drive and use that as SWAP. I've read they're not as fast as marketed for this, but at least I wouldn't have to worry about about wearing out my SSD.
- knowitnone3 9mo ago
  I've used it for mostly system rescue operations but it can do much more. Look at the package list for possibilities.
al_borland 9mo ago
I put tinycorelinux on an old laptop a family member was looking to get rid of. It was the only OS I could find that still supported the ancient cpu. It worked ok, but had a bit of a learning curve. I also had to run a couple commands every time I booted it up if I wanted to connect to wifi. I tried to get this to happen automatically, but wasn't having much luck. The password for the network also gets stored in plain text, so there was that. I didn't spend too much time on it, since it seemed like it was ultimately headed for the recycle bin and they just wanted to make sure none of their data was there, but thought if it worked decently well, maybe it could still be kept around and used.
- user3939382 9mo ago
  NetBSD + xfce is also decent in this scenario
  - entropicdrifter 9mo ago
    I prefer LXQt, uses significantly less RAM than xfce
kevin_thibedeau 9mo ago
> The one issue I have is that I can't copy paste text With pure X11 you copy paste via primary selection and middle click.
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
  Hmm I have always been in the wayland world (KDE,Hyprland etc.) but I have been on xfce in mxlinux and I didn't need to do primary selection & middle click I don't know if tinycore supports this. This was my biggest grievance because I had to create tmp files paste into it and then cat into it or something to work with this pain (which I feel like is pretty fixable/ maybe a skill issue from my side and honestly wishing for me to learn how to fix it)
knowitnone3 9mo ago
that one issue sounds like a deal breaker to me. I mean, I copy and paste all the time. The one thing I wish tc would do is have a searchable package like most distros do instead of providing a large text file of all packages. Shouldn't be too hard to implement but whatever.
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
  I mean fzf might help?

werdl 9mo ago

[flagged]

heraldgeezer 9mo ago
For us not in the know, why is this bad?
- desdenova 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - BSDobelix 9mo ago
    Please help me, Lunduke (who is a Jew) likes a project that is "nazi"? Or is it maybe that people who call everyone a "nazi" who they disagree the real one's? Stop degrading that word (to make common and without any weight) and use it for you crippled worldview.
    - snvzz 9mo ago
      These days, the label is being used to signal the labeled person is a target for violence[0]. Horrible. 0. https://world.hey.com/dhh/calling-someone-a-nazi-is-a-permission-slip-for-violence-4bfbbb82 https://world.hey.com/dhh/calling-someone-a-nazi-is-a-permis...
      - deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
- t-3 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - gambiting 9mo ago
    What's CoC in this context?

joecool1029 9mo ago

Woulda been a nice article if it covered the real reason xlibre’s founder got fired from RH, Enrico’s had a long history of pissing people off and posting cringe on main: https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/11/linus_torvalds_vaccine_smackdown/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/11/linus_torvalds_vaccin...

bboozzoo 9mo ago
Why should I care though?
- Mashimo 9mo ago
  Could say the same thing about why it's in the blog post. You don't have to care at all. It's just an odd blog post that just from technical intro to rant about DEI and censorship and back to technical details. And joecool1029 just provides more context to what was said in the blog post.
Mashimo 9mo ago
Odd little rant suddenly appears in the middle of it :D Here is how I set up minimal Desktop, WATCH 4 VIDEOS ABOUT HOW DEI IS KILLING OPEN SOURCE PROJECTS, and here is my loader.conf ...
anthk 9mo ago
Indeed. Xenocara would be a better bet. But the more these people have to collaborate with different people, the more empathy they will need. https://git.sr.ht/~rabbits/fashware https://git.sr.ht/~rabbits/fashware About Nemo (Fran J. Ballesteros from plan9/9front) he has half as encuse as he grew up (for sure) under the Francoist regime probably from the loaded family side, and, thus, he had to swallow tons of literal extreme right wing ideology even at school (Franco's regime). But the point on being a conspiranoid about the Covid... I would expect more sanity from the mindset from a guy perfectly abled in algoritmics, math and by proxy, science. Echo chambers create these kinds of idiots even on really smart people (the far right in Spain used cult like mechanics too), and I'm sure Fran changed a bit over time for the better. On the Cosmopolitan/APE person, I remind you that if you want to get back to Reissanance times, I'm a Spaniard, and thus, your whole ideology pales against the Iberian Humanism from the School of Salamanca, where at the time we were the Enlightened ones and you were just a bunch of WASP uneducated hicks living in filthy villages in the middle of Europe. Back to 9intro, even if you dislike ~nemo, 9intro it's still worth to learn programming on 9front, it's a great book to share and learn from. If would be a waste to ditch it just because some old fart doesn't get into the times. EDIT: ok, now I see ~nemo it's not that old, so a plausible indoctrination from the Francoism wouldn't apply there; but I'm pretty sure being a conspiranoid on Covid doesn't look like the normal socialization out there.

mono442 9mo ago

At the end of the post there is a comparison of ram usage of different desktop environments and the used ram is reported differently by every tool. So what exactly is being here measured as the used ram?

OsrsNeedsf2P 9mo ago

While this is cool, it all goes out the window the minute you run any app

janmalec 9mo ago
Exactly. The issue today is that even if you optimize your OS and DE to be very memory efficient, it matters very little as soon as you open a modern web browser. And without a modern web browser a big part of the online experience is broken.
- bandrami 9mo ago
  Beautifully, blissfully broken
- creshal 9mo ago
  Eh, kinda. Work forces me to have Jira, Confluence, Gitlab, Copilot, the other Copilot formerly known as Outlook, the other other Copilot formerly known as Teams, as well as Slack of course, and a dozen other webslop apps open… and it still all fits in <8GB RAM. Which is a lot worse than the <1GB you'd get with well-optimized native tools, but try running Win11 with "only" 8GB RAM.
  - mghackerlady 9mo ago
    I'm convinced the next windows GUI will just be an electron app that runs copilot as the desktop, forcing you to argue with it to open a file or run a program. Doesn't even have titlebars or window buttons or a task bar, just one big copilot bar at the bottom that you can ask whats already running or to close an app. All of this written in JavaScript of course
- eikenberry 9mo ago
  Aren't you optimizing your OS/DE to be memory efficient in order to use that memory for other things (like more web browser tabs)?
  - 9mo ago

badc0ffee 9mo ago

I remember booting up Debian into an X11 session on a laptop with only 8 MB of RAM. (This would have been circa 2000, and I think I had to try a few different distros before finding one that worked. Also I don't think I did anything with it beyond Xterm and Xeyes.)

hnlmorg 9mo ago
I doesn’t feel like that long ago when I built a swarm of Arch Linux based thin clients which PXE booted from a SLES DHCP & NFS host. That was probably around 2010 or 2015. Those images had to run on a thin client with 512 MB RAM. I think I chose XFCE as the DE.
- forinti 9mo ago
  In college we had a network of Sun workstations and some of the machines had only 8MB of RAM, IIRC. This was in the 90s. Then again, the X desktop was really minimal and I would use them mostly to code in C using a terminal.
hsbauauvhabzb 9mo ago
I don’t know how resolution maps to ram in x11 but I assume at least one byte per pixel. Based on that assumption, there’s no chance you’d even be able to power a 4k monitor with 8mb of ram, let alone the rest of the system.
- argsnd 9mo ago
  Presumably every pixel is 32 bits rather than just 8. So the count starts at 33.2MB just for the display.
  - stavros 9mo ago
    It is now, but back then it was 1 byte, with typical resolutions being 800x600. There were high-color modes but for a period it was rare to have good enough hardware for it.

giamma 9mo ago

It used to be like that, computer had limited resources and desktop environments were light. Then at some point RAM became less and less of an issue, and everything started to get bigger and less efficient. Coyuld anyone summarize why a desktop Windows/MacOs now needs so much more RAM than in the past? is it the UI animations, color themes, shades etc etc or is it the underlying operating system that has more and more features, services etc etc ? I believe it's the desktop environment that is greedy, because one can easily run a linux server on a raspberry pi with very limited RAM, but is it really the case?

roywashere 9mo ago
I am wondering if, with memory and storage prices skyrocketing, there will be more effort on making computing use less resources?
- t-3 9mo ago
  Unlikely. If you can't afford RAM, how can you afford the SaaS contracts that keep devs employed?
flohofwoe 9mo ago
> is it the UI animations, color themes, shades etc etc or is it the underlying operating system that has more and more features, services etc etc ? ...all of those and more? New software is only optimized until it is not outright annoying to use on current hardware, it's always been like that and that's why there are old jokes like: "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away." "Software is like a gas, it expands to consume all available hardware resources." "Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster" ...etc..etc... variations of those "laws" are as old as computing. Sometimes there are short periods where the hardware pulls a little bit ahead for a few short years of bliss (for instance the ARM Macs), but the software quickly catches up and soon everything feels as slow as always (or worse). That also means that the easiest way to a slick computing experience is to run old software on new hardware ;)
- creshal 9mo ago

ryan-c 9mo ago

opens blog post sees lunduke closes blog post

heraldgeezer 9mo ago
For us not in the know, why is this bad? Is he ""bigoted"" ? :(
- Mashimo 9mo ago
  I have no idea who he is, never heard of him. You shall not judge a book by its cover but .. he is making it hard. His video titles are: * Devuan: The Non-Woke Debian Linux Fork (Without Systemd) * NeoFetch But in Rust and More Gay * Chimera Linux is "Here to Further Woke Agenda by Turning Free Software Gay" * Are Jews the Cause of DEI in Big Tech? Yeah .. I did not watch a single video of his. But just from a short few seconds It's not anything I want to invest time in to see if he has a point or not. Life is too short.
  - bigpeopleareold 9mo ago
    Whatever I might agree or disagree with, this is annoying to look at, but his stuff keeps coming up in my YouTube feed. Even it looks slightly interesting, I know it will be some rant involved about a thing not related to technology, but some developer's personal opinions on non-tech ideas. I get it - people are horrible! Sheesh! FWIW, probably not much, he said he had a Jewish background ... in, like, the one video I watched and eventually gave up on.
    - FrostViper8 9mo ago
      You can just mute/hide a channel from your feed permanently.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 9mo ago
    > NeoFetch But in Rust and More Gay apt-install --fuck-yes gay-rust-neofetch I’ll look to migrate to chimera shortly, but only if it includes gay neofetch.

heraldgeezer 9mo ago

Cant wait to boot up my Windows 11 total bloat machine at home and work I kinda wanna try linux again...

undeveloper 9mo ago
it gets better every day

inatreecrown2 9mo ago

Running Alpine Linux with a minimal window manager gives me similar RAM usage, about 150MB

sunshine-o 9mo ago
This is quite good ! My Alpine Desktop (Root on ZFS, Wayland/Sway) starts with about 550MB
- lproven 9mo ago
  Ye gods, that's a lot. I run Xfce on Alpine on plain old ext4 and get 200MB or so used.

fredsted 9mo ago

Cool post. So much could be done on a couple hundred megabytes of ram back in the day, with spinning rust as storage to boot!

znpy 9mo ago

nice, now open a web browser and any modern website /s

gambiting 9mo ago
I'm sure Lynx would be fine.
- Mashimo 9mo ago
  Been over a decade since I used a terminal browser, how do they handle modern websites with javascript?
  - gambiting 9mo ago
    They don't. Javascript is completely unsupported.
themafia 9mo ago
It should run very quickly given that there are few things competing with it for resources like CPU cache space. It's like "your car is going to get dirty why even wash it?"
vermaden 9mo ago
If you want to stay low on resources you can use Netsurf. I just started it and loading my https://vermaden.wordpress.com/ https://vermaden.wordpress.com/ page used 86 MB of RAM - a lot less then Firefox or Chrome.
snvzz 9mo ago
frogfind can be quite helpful.

solaris2007 9mo ago

A long time ago the power supply blew out in the machine I played Counter Strike: Source on and I was a teenager just barely 16 with no money so I couldn't replace it. I was able to keep in touch with my drug dealers and my girlfriend's friends (who were also all super hot) which was very important to me at that age, in an environment where you really needed a car or people who had cars to do anything with anyone worth doing anything with. I got OpenSolaris booted on a Pentium II box that had 384mb of RAM then ran Openbox and a communications suite of SILC, IRC, Pidgin, Finch (a text frontend to libpurple), and some XMPP+OTR clients -- all in Solaris Zones to not get my shit wrecked by the same RCE exploits I was using against other Pidgin users (which seemed to be as numerous as exploits for the official AIM client). This was before Facebook. Solaris Zones gave me that feeling of power over software that Qubes enthusiasts like to talk about, similar dopamine+endorphin flow to being a military dictator of a 3rd world country. Shit was so cash. Thanks to Unix' elegance, I still had a life until moved enough herb to assemble another box I could run Counter Strike: Source (on FreeBSD, Cedega for the win) on.

la6776 9mo ago
Thanks for letting all these nerds on HN know how important it was to maintain contact with a drug dealer and super hot girls when you were a hip teenager, I mean... i totally get it because I was also a really cool hip teenager. Did we just become best friends?
- solaris2007 9mo ago
  Think of the gravity that Instagram/Facebook has today, or maybe things are different today, so had for millennials. Try to take away a young adult's phone today, you'll risk being eliminated. We had some neat handhelds with PCMCIA slots that OpenBSD ran on in those days but it was only the kids in "rich" neighborhoods that also had them and I was a year behind in getting those. The critical mass of the network effect at that time was on desktops and iBooks. > super hot girls Yeah a San Francisco 7 was like an 8 in Los Angeles and easily a 10 in most towns (in those days). They were prowling MySpace just as much as anyone else. You know what they're up to.
9mo ago

virajk_31 9mo ago

Yes, 200MB RAM without any non-essential apps (not really useful unless for a specific use case).

igtztorrero 9mo ago

It says: that uses 217 MB RAM with Devuan, and Devuan is a fork of Debian13

scrapheap 9mo ago

200MB for a desktop sounds massive to some of us :D Back in the day I used to have a desktop running, with applications, in just 512KB. Getting that memory upgrade to a full 1MB was amazing.

kiwijamo 9mo ago
I used to run Acorn's RISC OS in just 2MB of RAM.
- lproven 9mo ago
  I ran it in 1MB. :-) And it was fast and responsive, too. Soon afterwards I bought a Psion 3 which ran a multitasking GUI OS on an 8086 in 256 kB of RAM. That space was shared with file storage in a RAMdisc. https://phonedb.net/index.php?m=device&id=826&c=psion_series_3&d=detailed_specs https://phonedb.net/index.php?m=device&id=826&c=psion_series... It was perfectly viable to have multiple apps open and flip between them. It ran for weeks on a pair of AA batteries.
_joel 9mo ago
Yup, fond memories of my Amiga 500+ (full meg, woo!)
- pjmlp 9mo ago
  And for many scenarios people use their computers for, it would still be enough today.
- TheAmazingRace 9mo ago
  Or the Atari ST! I have one at home with 1 MB of RAM in it and it still flies. Boots up in less than a few seconds, which is faster than any of my modern PCs.
- snvzz 9mo ago
  Of chip RAM, too!

dTal 9mo ago

I remember, in 2007, running FreeBSD on a desktop with 512MB RAM and only using 64MB of it running full GNOME 2 and a running instance of Firefox with a couple tabs. A totally standard desktop experience. Even better, my laptop at the time had only 128MB of RAM and ran Windows XP - a supported, albeit minimal, configuration. XP was bloatier than FreeBSD of course, and ran correspondingly less well, but replacing explorer.exe with a shell called "blackbox" - an openbox-alike - and carefully curating applications (e.g. K-Meleon instead of Firefox) rendered it a perfectly viable multitasking desktop. I have a screenshot from that machine showing an AIM window, an mp3 player, an IDE for an embedded system, and a web browser with the documentation open for that IDE, all running comfortably (on one of its several desktops - yes you could have multiple desktops on XP with alternative shells such as blackbox). Computers now require approximately 30x the RAM to achieve similar levels of "barely viable" performance - 4GB is considered the absolute minimum for general purpose desktop viability. And qualitatively speaking, what do they do now, that my 2007 fleet did not do? It is difficult to say. One is led to the conclusion that something has gone terribly awry with resource consumption.

alyandon 9mo ago
It's the web browser and electron based apps that are the primary consumers of ram on my desktops with the DE and OS ram usage being minimal by comparison. I have an ancient laptop from 2008 with 4GB of ram that runs a modern KDE desktop and related applications just fine that I use for troubleshooting stuff. However, the moment I open a web browser it basically falls to pieces. I hate everything about this. :-/
- ValdikSS 9mo ago
  That's easy to fix: Step 1: sudo tee /etc/tmpfiles.d/mglru.conf <<EOF w- /sys/kernel/mm/lru_gen/enabled - - - - y w- /sys/kernel/mm/lru_gen/min_ttl_ms - - - - 300 EOF Step 2: apt install zram-tools sed -i 's/#PERCENT=.*/PERCENT=130/' /etc/default/zramswap
  - 9mo ago

Fnoord 9mo ago

I used to run KDE and GNOME on a computer with 256 MB RAM back around the year 2000. Athlon 1000 Sempron and a Duron 800 (one of these machines started out with 128 MB RAM). KDE 1.x, 2.x, GNOME 1.x, 2.x. I don't remember the very minor versions. I tried a myriad of Linux distributions, and FreeBSD as well. I settled for Debian. Back then, we (me, friends, family, etc.) thought these DE's were very bloated. I remember KDE 1.x very vividly because I had to compile it myself (or look online for binaries), and I digged the CDE theme. The first lightweight DE (if you discount fvwm) I used on Linux was XFce, but that was later on. I pretty much started with KDE, tried a bit of GNOME, went back to KDE (I came from Windows 9x). In the end, I learned to appreciate GNOME, and MacOSX or Mac OSX as I used to call it back then (proper name was Mac OS X, I suppose). My point is what you are used to is your reference point. The underlying OS isn't super relevant. On Linux, every distribution gets on par with each other eventually. On FreeBSD I used OSS and something like winmodem is just crap hardware. Nowadays my homelab and desktop have 64 GB RAM, while my MBP (M1Pro) only has 16 GB RAM which is the same as its successor (MBP 2015 with 16 GB RAM). Do I use all of that? Not really, but the main culprit is browser(s) (which includes apps these days). Curious if you can play Steam games well on FreeBSD. FreeBSD has a couple of neat things (tho ZFS is now better on Linux). I've always preferred PF to IPT.

ronjakoi 9mo ago
I used to run Gnome on 8 MB in the late 90s

LeoNatan25 9mo ago

[flagged]

pmdr 9mo ago

The future of computing, now that @sama is gobbling up all the RAM.

js-j 9mo ago

Consider the Sharp Zaurus (SL-C860, for example): - Intel Xscale PXA255 400 MHz - 64 MB SDRAM - Linux/QTopia desktop environment

ruslan 9mo ago

When I was watching that Lunduke's video a couple of days ago initially I was thinking he's just making a joke of that Vendefoul Wolf distro on 200MB box. I recalled using FreeBSD as access server with lots of modems (PPP/SLIP), Apache, Samba and QuakeWorld server running on a box with just 32MB of RAM. That was also my daily working machine with XF86 and Enlightenment desktop manager, circa 2000. So, 200MB is a whole lot of memory!

lostmsu 9mo ago

Just to remind people here: a single uncompressed "4k" picture is 33MB. Have your compositor hold 10 of them and you get 330MB just for the window images. Across multiple monitors my desktop is 6400x2160, which at 32 bits comes to 55MB. Considering memory is slow and GPU compute these days is cheap maybe it would make sense to relayout and rerender things each frame directly into screen buffer instead of keeping the window surface buffers resident. That would require rewriting quite a lot of things though.

zozbot234 9mo ago
You need window surface buffers in order to do seamless compositing, scaling etc. It's quite technically possible to achieve pixel-perfect 2D rendering with GPU-side compute, but in many ways it's still an open problem.
- lostmsu 9mo ago
  Scaling is for legacy apps, right? Modern apps should get the area to render and the desired pixel density. Not sure what you mean specifically by "need" in "need ... to do compositing". Compositing is just a way (e.g. rerender only on changes, cache results) of running a desktop environment. Strictly speaking you don't need compositing, you can just use immediate mode across the DE and apps. The tradeoff of course is that if an app is lagging you get a blank rectangle instead of a frozen picture. Well not quite 0 or 1. You can cache lowres and/or compressed frozen picture periodically to improve UX.
  - zozbot234 9mo ago
    > Modern apps should get the area to render and the desired pixel density. What if you want to smoothly slide an app window over to a second monitor with a different pixel density? That's admittedly a very rare thing, but some people seem to be obsessed with it and insist that it must work. You either have to compose some window surface, or just use clean vector rendering throughout.
    - 9mo ago

wormius 9mo ago

"Redskirts" hahaha you are so funny and clever. Let me say something you kinda guys like to hear: "Keep your social bullshit politics out of my tech stories"

aktau 9mo ago

I still have some screenshots in my GitHub repository of what my ArchLinux with AwesomeWM (X11) looked like in 2009. Those screenshots also contain the RSS, as luck would have it. 34MiB when on the desktop (clean), running X.org, AwesomeWM and xcompmgr (for compositing). Screenshot: https://github.com/aktau/awesome/blob/master/screenshots/2009-07-27-105211_1280x800_scrot.png https://github.com/aktau/awesome/blob/master/screenshots/200... 57MiB with a couple of applications open. From memory: urxvt running htop, thunar (XFCE file manager) and the Mirage image viewer (which is Python, not otherwise known for efficiency). Screenshot: https://github.com/aktau/awesome/blob/master/screenshots/2009-07-19-213545_1280x800_scrot.png https://github.com/aktau/awesome/blob/master/screenshots/200... Nowadays, even with a tiling WM that's supposed to be lightweight (say: Sway), the minimum appears to be well over 300MiB (see https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1njecy5/wayland_compositors_ram_usage_comparison/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1njecy5/wayland_comp...). GNOME 49 takes up around 1GiB last time I tried it (NixOS). Interestingly https://www.reddit.com/r/swaywm/comments/oghner/how_does_the_resource_usage_of_sway_compare_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/swaywm/comments/oghner/how_does_the... from 5 years ago mentions Sway only using 115MiB. What happened? Theories I have: - 32-bit to 64-bit means all points are double the size. That would account for something. - Wayland vs X11. I should compare Sway versus X.org+i3. - General library and system daemon bloat.