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Booting into Debian with most devices fully functional is great. What I'd like to know is what software runs adequately under it in 4 GB RAM. Web browsing shou
by nine_k 5mo ago
Booting into Debian with most devices fully functional is great.
What I'd like to know is what software runs adequately under it in 4 GB RAM. Web browsing should definitely be possible, but I suppose it's limited to very few tabs. Some very lightweight DE could likely make it more usable. Running something like WezTerm + tmux as the DE could be even more economical, leaving some room for e.g. development tools.
- singpolyma3 5mo agoPretty much everything. I only had 4GB ram until two or three years ago. No swap. Never ran into an issue.
- logicchains 5mo ago>I only had 4GB ram until two or three years ago. No swap. Never ran into an issue That sounds like an problem Windows could solve.
- BobbyTables2 5mo agoAlso sounds like a problem they don’t want to solve… If people have to buy new PCs, that’s more $$$ for Microsoft.
- pjmlp 5mo agoWindows traces back to running comfortably with 4 MB, and my first Linux distro, Slackaware run with 32 MB. We can start by throwing all that Electron junk out of the window, pun intended.
- exe34 5mo agoI have 8GB, which I've had since 2012. Never had a problem - I run a lean Nixos with just xmonad and dmenu, chrome, emacs, and about a dozen open pdfs and video tutorials.
- niekkamer 5mo agoSame here still use my laptop with 8GB DDR4 with Manjaro running. Since I have a desktop I do use rustdesk way more often to just boot into that.
- cbdevidal 5mo agoY’all are embarrassing me with Lubuntu and Chrome on a 2013 Dell with 16GB and an SSD. Not fast enough for all I need to do but covers 80% of my needs. It’s my road laptop and the home desktop handles the rest. But you’re doing much better than me.
- exe34 5mo agoMine is a 2012 mac book air, I've replaced the battery early this year, and last month I upgraded the ssd to 1tb. I expect this computer will be a family heirloom after the apocalypse.
- cbdevidal 5mo agoIt still functionable https://www.youtube.com/shorts/p1R9mpezxh0 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/p1R9mpezxh0
- exhilaration 5mo agoI'm curious, how much to replace the battery? I bought my kid a used 2015 MacBook Air like 5 years ago and it needs a new battery, otherwise it's totally fine.
- exe34 5mo ago£24 on ebay - it wasn't an authentic apple battery or anything. At this point, as long as it doesn't burn down the house, it's fine if it destroys the laptop. You need to make sure you look at the model and the emc number and check that they match the battery you're buying. (Same for SSD upgrades).
- 5mo ago
- roryirvine 5mo agoBrowsers and anything electron-based are your enemy. Firefox is actually pretty good in low-memory situations, silently discarding tabs when under memory pressure, but the main benefit comes from being able to run proper adblocking. Chromium-based browsers just can't compete these days. Otherwise, a bog standard Gnome-based Debian Trixie desktop should be pretty doable. I'm currently using an 8 GB machine with 3.7 GB RAM free - Firefox, evolution, gnome-calendar, and gnome-software are the only apps that using more than 100 MB, and none of them are obligatory.
- NooneAtAll3 5mo agoit's probably the "you only notice when it doesn't work" situation, but my experience with firefox on ram limit has been a lot about tabs forgetting the url in them as in, I click "open in new tab", some time later I switch to them... only to get hit with "new tab", even though a moment ago it displayed tab name and I could right click -> bookmark to preemptively copy the address
- nine_k 5mo agoTry the "Auto tab discard" extension. It allows me to have hundreds of tabs "open" and (in combination with Tree Style Tabs) largely blur the line between "browser sessions" and "bookmarks".
- srean 5mo agoFar better than bookmarks. Bookmarks do not store click history, the trajectory you took to arrive at the page. With tabs, the contexts is a backbutton away.
- roryirvine 5mo agoYeah, agreed. The built-in tab discarder only kicks in when there's actual memory pressure, so can sometimes be a bit precarious. Auto tab discard happens way before that, so tends not to be affected in the same way. I guess it uses more i/o in total, but it's not noticeable on a system with a fast-ish SSD. It can still be a bit iffy when memory's really tight, but even then a simple tab reload is usually enough to fix things.
- NooneAtAll3 5mo agohaving many tabs is perfectly fine - it's having many *youtube* tabs is troublesome main trouble to me has been caused by unity games - those are the big ram devourers, even most basic 2D ones (I still don't understand how that happens, why such regression since KSP days) and plenty of 2D games work perfectly fine (devs really overestimate minimal requirements)
- Rohansi 5mo ago> main trouble to me has been caused by unity games Generally it's probably just bad optimization. But that only gets you so far because Unity's asset streaming is designed to work with level-based games. It will only let you unload assets if you package them per-level and then swap them in and out at load screens between levels. Absolutely useless for games like KSP.
- NooneAtAll3 5mo ago> Absolutely useless for games like KSP. and yet KSP flies fine, while visual novels crash
- Rohansi 5mo agoCan't blame the engine for all of the poorly made games!
- MarsIronPI 5mo agoBattle for Wesnoth can run on <4 GB.
- not_your_vase 5mo agoCan't speak for OP, of course. Some time ago I got myself a similarly priced x86-64 Windows tablet on Amazon (Celeron N4020 + 4 GB RAM). I installed Linux Mint on it with a slightly customized kernel (some extra quirks were needed). I connected an old SSD to it with a SATA2USB adapter, and I use it as a home file server and HTPC. It has a micro HDMI output, and it is connected to my TV. During the day it is playing music non-stop, in the evening it is playing some movies. It has no problem with high bitrate full HD movies, the CPU doesn't even break a sweat. I think it could also play 4K content, if I had any. (Previously I used a Mac Mini with VLC for this for a few years, but I'm happier with my current setup, it's more stable)
- elch 5mo agoDoes it boot from the card? Is there an installation guide available somewhere?
- not_your_vase 5mo agoI find this to be a bit strange question considering that I haven't mentioned the tablet model... but incidentally the answer is "yes" to both questions - it can boot from sd card also (beside eMMC), and there is a setup guide available: https://github.com/biolds/tibuta-w100/ https://github.com/biolds/tibuta-w100/ (somewhat similar to the OP one)
- HlessClaudesman 5mo agoYeah can confirm Mint XFCE works well on low end devices. The only bug I encountered is backups quickly swamping available HDD space, but it runs fine with auto backups off.
- throwaway27448 5mo agoFrankly if you don't need a web browser (or electron), what WOULD require that much memory? Video and photo editing maybe? Postgres? Recompiling the world?
- sellmesoap 5mo agoI first started recompiling the world with 64MB of ram, kind of funny how far we've come on hardware and made software gobble up the gains with very little to show for it.
- jolmg 5mo agoGot a PinePhone Pro with 4GB. > I suppose it's limited to very few tabs Not really. Haven't used it super heavily, but I haven't felt limited by tabs. It can handle multiple YouTube tabs, too. > Some very lightweight DE could likely make it more usable. Running something like WezTerm + tmux as the DE I use sway on it. It's perfectly responsive. I expect i3 with Xorg would also be. Neither count as a DE, but neither does a terminal + tmux.
- fnord77 5mo agolynx
- prmoustache 5mo agoWhat software doesn't run with 4GB of ram is the real question.
- SchemaLoad 5mo agoMost individual programs will run with 4GB but you won't be able to have multiple open at the same time.
- prmoustache 5mo agoIt is really only a problem with electron apps that you can usually easily replace with opening the corresponding website on a browser and have more native and less memory hungry alternatives. If you favor them over a huge DE, a distro with a lightweight window mamager / wayland compositor will only use around a hundred of megabytes, so with 3.8-3.9GB you have plenty of memory to run apps running on regular OS toolkits. And having a bit of hygiene like exiting apps you are not actively using goes a long way.
- pjmlp 5mo agoA couple of Electron junk apps.
- imtringued 5mo agoThe Claude Code installer doesn't.
- Nezk 5mo agoUntil a couple of months ago, I was using a Late 2013 MacBook Pro Retina with 4 GB of RAM as my main work computer (and I still use it as a secondary machine). It's amusing to read that some people can't imagine getting by with 4 GB of RAM on a device not meant for heavy work.
- tnelsond4 5mo agoI use dwm and brave and 10 tabs or so and I'm usually at about 2-3gb of RAM used.
- laughing_man 5mo agoI run Ubuntu on my Chromebook. It's what I'm using to read this now. Web browsing works just fine. There's a limit to how many sites I can have open at a time, but since I regularly view sites that use over 1 GB of ram in Chromium, that's the case on all my machines. Most of the games I play run in 4 GB, but since my Chromebook only has 32 GB of storage, There are some I can't install and I generally only have four or five installed at any given time.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5mo agoApparently there is a VIP-edition with 16GB RAM, still under 200$. https://www.doogee.com/products/u10-vip-edition?variant=44314741047491 https://www.doogee.com/products/u10-vip-edition?variant=4431... If that would be real RAM, and not only swap I'd feel tempted. Edit: Never mind, already sold out...(meanwhile, 15 minutes, or so)
- briansm 5mo agoI had to read that twice, I first thought you meant 4 GB of _storage_... Worrying about only having 4GB of RAM.... that's how I know I'm getting old I guess. Kids these days don't know they're born.
- madduci 5mo agoWith partial 3D acceleration, I guess web browsing is a bad experience
- tech4bot 5mo agoOnly when it comes to videos or something that it requires to use the CPU instand of the GPU, but overall works good.
- pjmlp 5mo agoI originally ran Slackware 2.0 with 32 MB on a Pentium 75 Mhz. So the software does exist, plus for the TUI and CLI folks, that would be plenty of space.
- bdavbdav 5mo agoUnfortunately I think just the SSL stack to support a TLS connection would saturate that now
- pjmlp 5mo agoDepends on how much browsing one is planning to do, which is why I focused on the TUI and CLI as examples on my comment. Even if it is SSH to some cloud server it might be ok. We lost quite a bit moving away from Internet protocols into everything is HTTP(S).
- Fnoord 5mo agoWe also had a Pentium 75 MHz IIRC, but IIRC it came with 8 MB RAM. It came with OS/2 Warp. Running DOS on top of it was too limited, performance wise. Running MSDOS directly however, was amazing. The machine would run all the software I wanted. Apps and games. It also ran Windows 95, but the learning curve and speed. I was used to MSDOS.
- pjmlp 5mo agoOS/2 Warp was at the same level as running Windows NT in hardware requirements. When I bought my 386SX 20 Mhz with 2MB, 40 MB HDD, that came with DR-DOS 5 and Windows 3.1, I could have bought a PC with OS/2 2.0 instead, in today's money that would have bumped my credit request in an additional 1000 euros, for the additional hardware. So DR-DOS + Win 3.1 it was.
- NL807 5mo ago>What I'd like to know is what software runs adequately under it in 4 GB RAM. I find this question rather sad.
- MarsIronPI 5mo agoI can run my everyday software stack (Emacs + Firefox + Dino) on my 3 GB RAM Pinephone. It's not as fast as my 8 GB laptop, but that's partly the CPU too. Hope this makes you feel better.
- AlecSchueler 5mo agoI'm still using an old x200 with 2GB RAM as my daily driver. I just run xmonad and everything is pretty snappy. I can browse with multiple tabs without an issue, as long as I avoid very heavy sites like GMail.
- fsflover 5mo ago> What I'd like to know is what software runs adequately under it in 4 GB RAM I daily driver Librem 5 phone running a Debian-based operating system with 3 GB of RAM. NoScript on Firefox allows me to browse quite well. Zram helps, too. By the way, unlike the discussed device, my phone runs a mainline Linux kernel.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5mo agoI have a 4GB surface tablet running Fedora that I use for very light duty tasks like PDF reading or listening to music. The memory holds it back for much else because it begins swapping.