In the early 1990s the team I worked on shared a Sun Sparcstation using a number of X terminal devices connected the main system. It had 32 MB of RAM and 1GB hard drive. 🙂
Someone launches emacs and everyone notices 😵💫 Still, I imagine a windowing system of that era to be mostly just a way to arrange xterms and run the occasional app written with motif, black and white graphics
@@vizionthing have u tried out the bubble screen saver on bubbly bubbly linux? it's so good, it's the only reason i use bubbly bubbly linux as my main distro
I had heard of Puppy Linux, but never paid any attention to it. I got excited when I saw your slides mentioning that it is based on JVM. That would be something different! Imagine a window manager or Wayland compositor implemented on top of JavaFX. But, alas, Puppy Linux uses JWM, which stands for Joe's Window Manager...
I quite like Alpine Linux for ease of installation. If you disable crond and chronyd you can get the RAM usage at boot down to about 70 MB. Though part of me thinks that's still a lot. In 1997 you could run a full desktop (and web browser) in just 16 MB RAM under OS/2.
A part of the extra RAM nowadays come from having 64 bit. Pointers are 8 bytes now. Though I am curious where the rest goes. I think another part is also having support for cryptography. I'm not sure if you can escape it. The file system themselves also clearly are more complex (and robust) than what we had in the 90s, so surely a bit more code and RAM there. Any other ideas ?
Thank you for the comparison! I know tha SliTaz is one of the most lightweight desktops with about 50MB of RAM. Tested on a a weird machine with very limited RAM. Then Tiny Core came second with 60 to 80MB if I remember correctly.. But for actual modern-day usage, a full install of the major distros generally comes with a 800MB to 1.7GB of RAM usage after boot. I was a bit surprised by your results as the RAM usage was generally higher in my experience. In any case, way lower than the typical Windows 10 or 11 setup. Effect-heavy distros used to take a higher toll. For example KDE5. The new KDE6 uses less memory. Also, Mint for example comes with a lot of things bundled in, so the memory usage is greater. If you were to install Cinnamon on Arch for example, then the RAM usage would be about a third of the official version. Your typical Arch with a basic stack of drivers would take roughly 100MB to 200MB of RAM. Installing a DE or WM would raise the usage to 400+MB. Background services also add to the cold boot usage. Also, it might be worth noting that different apps shows different stats. For example, there's a difference between htop and btop. If I remember correctly, one of them ignores cached memory.
Not sure if it matters in this case, but if you have a GUI active, the resolution contributes to RAM usage. Aka higher desktop resolution - extra RAM needed. I don't remember any figures but it shouldn't be that much, but especially if going, say, 4K, it should be visible vs 1080p.
@@GaryExplains It's not a problem to run glibc code on the musl system - there are guides on how to do this. PostmarketOS (based on Alpine) is making progress to switch to systemd - it's easier to deal with certain behaviors. You can check their blog as to why they are making that move. GNU or not, Alpine is awesome. Sticking with FOSS software eliminates pretty much all friction. If you need proprietary code - chances are glibc dependency may crop up.
@@GaryExplains the use a musl caused a lot of problems with older versions of Java like Java 8, for example, to use Apline you had to install Glibc inside the Alpine container, it was far from clean, thankfully it's a thing of the past. My company is a big Java shop and when we evaluated Alpine at the time, it was significantly slower at memory allocation with Java. I wouldn't know the situation now as we haven't reviewed it since.
interesting comparison. i love using Slackware with xfce..light and fast. browsers caches lots of contents and chrome is especially bad. does gary have a comparison on realtime os?
One thing to think about when it comes to older systems is if you really should be using 64bit instead of 32bit. 32bit is using less memory, but it becomes rare as many distros are not available in 32bit. With limited resources, you want the system to be using as little as possible. Would be nice to watch a movie on the subject of how to get the most out of a 1 to 4 gb system. Like zram, alternative to ssh and shell.
Surprisingly both the 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Alpine Linux use about the same amount of RAM, at least in my experience.
วันที่ผ่านมา
@zoomosis but then we must take all applications we want to run as well. I think it was on the youtube channel 'explaining computers' who have made a comparison between 32 and 64 bit.
Good on you for skipping Fedora! Red Hat's treatment of CentOS was far from community centered! I was never a big fan of RH either. SuSE 4 life 😂 And yes, I really do love SuSE! I'm not sure it's super lightweight, but I have had great luck using it as a desktop system, and their KDE support has always been top notch. Sorry for being off topic slightly 😂
I support his decision too. I'm also still baffled that people recommend Fedora to new users. Fedora, while being quite polished and overall a big contributor to moving things forward, I think it's terrible for a new user because they're so happy to adopt new stuff and remove old stuff, even if the old one was working fine. Even if it breaks workflows. That means that people might find themselves not being able to upgrade without having things break. Or upgrading and having things break.
Thank you for this. I just upgraded linux mint (xfce) to 22 and im definitely seeing the toll on my old laptop versus version 20 (xfce). Im not too sure whats up.. might give lubuntu a try.
No. It is just that I asked specifically in the video to not post comments about distros I didn't test (other than to recommend them, which is what I asked at the end of the video).
Next head over to the Internet Archive and grab yourself a copy of a mid-90s Debian, RH, Slackware, SuSE, Mandrake, ... CD ISO, the file size will be a few hundred MB, the kernel will require less than 4MB of RAM, X will start if you have 8MB of RAM, with about the same in swap space. Then play spot the difference between the cmd line tools, and Xeyes, XPilot, xv, ... versions available in the mid 90s, and required a hundredth of the resources of their present iterations.
@@GaryExplains You could have a play to see how much you could shrink the memory footprint, of a current distribution, if you were to recompile the kernel without USB-4, WiFi, bluetooth, webcam, touch input, asymmetric CPU type support, anything more than SVGA graphics, ... , and compare to the memory foot print of a mid-90s distribution, that only offered kernel modules for your wired NE2000 NIC, S3 graphics, Soundblaster, PS2 mouse and keyboard, if you were lucky.
@AndrewRoberts11 While that could be fun, I don't think the amount of effort it would require vs the number of people who would watch that video, would mean it would be worthwhile!
@@GaryExplains Many enterprises run custom kernels, if not full stacks, with the ~35 years of kernel module bloat pruned (there was that a.out to ELF reworking of the Kernel around 94). Have a play at recompiling the kernel with all the unused filesystems dropped, unused hardware modules dropped, ... , of your chosen VM. You should end up with a smaller kernel, that's also quicker to compile.
@@AndrewRoberts11 I would love to see things like that, especially since I'm curious what's taking up the extra space. But Gary has a diverse range of topics, he doesn't have the time to do deep dives like that.
@@marioprawirosudiro7301 In the context of laptops, we're usually talking about desktop OS, and then other stuff starts to limit you. MacOS is a great example - it does use significant memory, but the rest of the OS is very optimized, so it runs very smooth. Or for Linux DEs, being GPU-accelerated makes a big difference in how smooth the GUI will operate. This was even an issue on Windows 7 - using the classic interface over Aero would, despite the simplistic look, make the GUI significantly slower, because without the DWM, stuff would need constant redraws.
@@graealex Yes, desktop OS. On a machine with 8 gigs _soldered-on_ memory (lots of modern laptops, especially those based on Ryzen 7xxx series). Of which around 2 gigs or so would be allocated for VRAM - meaning we only have around 6 gigs to play around with. If the distro itself takes 2 gigs on fresh boot, that's 4 gigs left. At this point, let's hope the user doesn't open too many tabs while browsing... GPU acceleration would not be the bottleneck here. It's the constant back and forth swapping due to lack of memory.
Linux Mint with either Cinnamon or XFCE remain my top recommendations for new users; being a guy with one foot in the Windows world, I usually found KDE or LXQt desktop environments to be a bit more comfortable than GNOME. (Also, Fedora + GNOME eats about as much RAM as Windows 10) If you want to really drop the RAM usage, logging out of your full desktop and into a window manager like IceWM can free up some resources for more demanding tasks (and you can still open up your full desktop apps if necessary).
My most budget laptop uses a 6W Pentium Silver N5030 with 4 core/threads and has 4GB of RAM, although Conky says it is only 3.65GB. My EndeavourOS Cinnamon uses 1GB (27%) to boot. I've given it 8GB of Swap, although it rarely uses any of it (none for booting). This setup is very usable. My Win10/11 ECS Liva QC710 (Snapdragon 7c), which also has only 4GB of RAM, was unusably slow, extremely anemic. Guessing the N5030 is also more powerful than the Snapdragon 7c, so perhaps an unfair comparison.
Fedora is fat, but Red Hat was one of the companies that gave US$2M to the One Laptop Per Child project so that is what they used. They quickly went from 128MB in the first generation prototypes to 256MB in the production model in order to deal with this and Microsoft was able to squeeze Windows XP into this expanded memory. This caused Negroponte to say he had been wrong to say that open source would allow them to have lower cost hardware than commercial software, but he was wrong about being wrong - just use a Linux that isn't Fedora!
I did a test with the three versions of Mint 21.3 installed with the needed drivers and the desktop idle, no apps open. Xfce used 1.1 GB, MATE 1.3 GB, Cinnamon 1.8 GB. The Mac laptop used 3.5 GB with Sonoma, huge overhead although it does preload whatever it thinks you might want to do next.
My mint 20.3 XFCE idles with nothing open at around 540MB's.. .. add in hexchat and some pulse effects (my audio setup is a bit strange) and it gets to the mid 600's..
How can you call OpenIndiana an Enterprise System, when you know that "OpenIndiana is a distribution developed and maintained by a community of volunteers." Volunteers != Enterprise.
Interesting. Here's some random mentions: - I support Gary in not testing Fedora. Other than the ethical reasons, I'm still baffled that people recommend it to new users, which might be a setup for later frustrations when upgrading to a new Fedora could break important workflows for an user. Or the update to not work. Fedora is too happy to embrace new stuff and ditch working "old" stuff to be a safe option for someone who is not aware and ok with this approach. - a bit weird that there were 3 tests on XFCE and only one on KDE. And also 3 on GNOME. By popularity, usage, features, it should be more like 3 GNOME, 3 KDE and 2 XFCE. Or at the very least one more KDE instead of a 3rd XFCE - a bit out of scope for this video, but it's important to know that different distros and desktop environments (and flavours/spins/profiles) come with different things supported, availabile and installed. Hence the different RAM usage. You might find yourself that if you take one of the ligher distro and add the things you want on top, you might end up using more RAM than another distro that maybe had those things you wanted already installed and possibly optmized. Or missing something else that you don't need and recoup some RAM and disk space there. In truth, if you know what you want and configure everything as you want and need, you'll probably reach the same RAM usage on all distros, as you'll effectively eliminate the differences. So, if you care about how much RAM you use (like maybe you have an old laptop and it only has 4 GB of RAM), then after picking a distro (which you shouldn't spend too much time on) you should learn what you have installed and what you use out of it, and what you actually need, so you can know what to remove/uninstall or change. - a minor thing, but having a higher desktop resolution (when using any GUI) adds up a bit on RAM usage. Don't have exact figures, but it should be pretty minimal, like several MB to a couple hundred MBs - if anyone is happening to read this, I would like to mention one distro that allows you somewhat easily to control what you use and to tune to quite a high degree the kernel and all the apps you install on your system: Gentoo. The thing with Gentoo is that the norm is to compile every app you install (though you have precompiled options too, especially for the big apps like browsers which can take a lot to compile). Now, you can compile an app on any distro, but Gentoo streamlines it. And also allows to further customize by a thing called "USE flags". With these you basically give compiler options. And with these you can compile exactly for your system. And exactly what you need and want out of it (well, as much as the use flags allow, which is dependent on who made the package in that repo). And Gentoo allows for more advanced things, like LTO (link time optimization). For example you can have the app compiled exactly for your new processor, without the need to have it supported to work on a Core 2 Duo, so you can use more advanced CPU instructions. You can have it compiled specifically just for X or just for Wayland, not both, since you only use X or only use Wayland. Lastly, you can, say compile without bluetooth support, since your desktop doesn't have bluetooth. The same for the kernel. Now, to be fair, using another kernel, or compiling it yourself is not exactly something unique with Gentoo. It just happens more statistically, since people using Gentoo are already in the customizing mentality. There's a lot of things you can not use, as compared to a generic kernel, if you tune it to your system (so you can remove a lot of drivers that you won't use since you simply don't have those devices). Are you only using XFS and nothing with ext4, btrfs, bcachefs and all that jazz ? Well, you can only have xfs in your kernel. And so on. Having a smaller kernel impacts how much RAM it needs. It can also very slightly boost your boot speed, if it's smaller.
Really interesting. I switched from Debian to Arch Linux largely because it's easier to install the latest version of various packages using yay. I also started using msys2 on Windows VM's because WSL breaks due to nested virtualization. msys2 also uses pacman. Alpine does look interesting for containers--I haven't heard of it.
My work uses alpine in build pipelines. Each run effectively recreates the build environment from nothing in docker, which means copying 30 MB alpine vs 200 MB Centos adds up timewise. Thing is, the build server is running dozens of jobs at once so “start, run the stuff stuff, copy the build artifacts, close” cycle needs to be tight
Down load side is totally un related to the run time size as is a container memory foot print, for containers you need to include the host OS memory foot print.
I sometimes use Tom's Root Boot since it fits into a single floppy disk. It hasn't been updated since 2002 and is kernel 2 and command line with not much functionality, but for old machines it gets the job done. For slightly newer machines a live CD-ROM is better, and even newer a USB drive or SD card.
Surely the init system is going to play a part in the ram usage. Which is why I like runit as if feels lighter than systemD. My favourite distro is Void Linux.
@@bertblankenstein3738 Well, not just "technically". It is not Linux. Say that to BSD users, and you'll offend them harder than if you directly insult their parents.
Windows compared to Android is same as fluorescent light bulb compared to incandescent one. Linux (with GUI) is a LED then. Seriously, why does phone system need to use 6 to 8 GB of RAM on idle ? And each openex app near 200-500 MB minimum ? I thought it was supposed to be efficient.
@@GaryExplains those were all rhetorical questions. Android has the worst RAM allocation model and overhead in the world, and I just don't get, why Google doesn't focus on performance and efficiency in comparatively"weak" mobile devices. We need UEFI and consequently easily installed Linux in our phones, not yet another virtualization layer and usage limitations (bye side loading ?).
In the early 1990s the team I worked on shared a Sun Sparcstation using a number of X terminal devices connected the main system. It had 32 MB of RAM and 1GB hard drive. 🙂
Someone launches emacs and everyone notices 😵💫
Still, I imagine a windowing system of that era to be mostly just a way to arrange xterms and run the occasional app written with motif, black and white graphics
@@johnsimon8457 I was using emacs. We were writing an IDE for parallel computing
I had Windows 3.1 on a 80286 with a 20MB hard Drive
@@UmVtCg likewise ... don't remember if it had 2MB or 4MB of RAM
why didn't you cover bubbly bubbly linux distro?
😂
Best in all categories, so there was no need to show it.
The problem with BBL is that its got far too much junk in the trunk.
@@vizionthing have u tried out the bubble screen saver on bubbly bubbly linux? it's so good, it's the only reason i use bubbly bubbly linux as my main distro
1:10
I had heard of Puppy Linux, but never paid any attention to it. I got excited when I saw your slides mentioning that it is based on JVM. That would be something different! Imagine a window manager or Wayland compositor implemented on top of JavaFX. But, alas, Puppy Linux uses JWM, which stands for Joe's Window Manager...
Best fat shaming I've see all year - cheers Gary
I quite like Alpine Linux for ease of installation. If you disable crond and chronyd you can get the RAM usage at boot down to about 70 MB.
Though part of me thinks that's still a lot. In 1997 you could run a full desktop (and web browser) in just 16 MB RAM under OS/2.
Considering you can get a RPI Zero 2 with 512MBs for 20 euros I think we'll be OK 😂
A part of the extra RAM nowadays come from having 64 bit. Pointers are 8 bytes now.
Though I am curious where the rest goes. I think another part is also having support for cryptography. I'm not sure if you can escape it. The file system themselves also clearly are more complex (and robust) than what we had in the 90s, so surely a bit more code and RAM there. Any other ideas ?
Alpine 🥳 Up next, the BSDs?!
Thank you for the comparison!
I know tha SliTaz is one of the most lightweight desktops with about 50MB of RAM. Tested on a a weird machine with very limited RAM. Then Tiny Core came second with 60 to 80MB if I remember correctly..
But for actual modern-day usage, a full install of the major distros generally comes with a 800MB to 1.7GB of RAM usage after boot. I was a bit surprised by your results as the RAM usage was generally higher in my experience. In any case, way lower than the typical Windows 10 or 11 setup.
Effect-heavy distros used to take a higher toll. For example KDE5. The new KDE6 uses less memory. Also, Mint for example comes with a lot of things bundled in, so the memory usage is greater. If you were to install Cinnamon on Arch for example, then the RAM usage would be about a third of the official version.
Your typical Arch with a basic stack of drivers would take roughly 100MB to 200MB of RAM. Installing a DE or WM would raise the usage to 400+MB. Background services also add to the cold boot usage.
Also, it might be worth noting that different apps shows different stats. For example, there's a difference between htop and btop. If I remember correctly, one of them ignores cached memory.
Both htop and btop shows cached ram on my devuan stable (out of the box apps)
Not sure if it matters in this case, but if you have a GUI active, the resolution contributes to RAM usage. Aka higher desktop resolution - extra RAM needed. I don't remember any figures but it shouldn't be that much, but especially if going, say, 4K, it should be visible vs 1080p.
Alpine isn't GNU, so perhaps that influences the lower RAM use, but also might affect compatibility.
Indeed, it doesn't use GNU, which is why it is so important. Are you aware of any compatibility problems or are you just mud slinging?
@@GaryExplains I've no idea about the compatibility level, and hoping someone will investigate and explain how good or bad the compatibility is.
@@GaryExplains It's not a problem to run glibc code on the musl system - there are guides on how to do this.
PostmarketOS (based on Alpine) is making progress to switch to systemd - it's easier to deal with certain behaviors. You can check their blog as to why they are making that move.
GNU or not, Alpine is awesome. Sticking with FOSS software eliminates pretty much all friction. If you need proprietary code - chances are glibc dependency may crop up.
@@martineyles Alpine uses busybox instead of gnu and musl libc instead of glibc. However, as far as I know, the gnu tools can be installed.
@@GaryExplains the use a musl caused a lot of problems with older versions of Java like Java 8, for example, to use Apline you had to install Glibc inside the Alpine container, it was far from clean, thankfully it's a thing of the past. My company is a big Java shop and when we evaluated Alpine at the time, it was significantly slower at memory allocation with Java. I wouldn't know the situation now as we haven't reviewed it since.
interesting comparison. i love using Slackware with xfce..light and fast. browsers caches lots of contents and chrome is especially bad. does gary have a comparison on realtime os?
Looks like I would not have needed 32 GB of RAM - guess I simply wanted 32 GB of RAM
I know that feeling! 😁
One thing to think about when it comes to older systems is if you really should be using 64bit instead of 32bit. 32bit is using less memory, but it becomes rare as many distros are not available in 32bit. With limited resources, you want the system to be using as little as possible.
Would be nice to watch a movie on the subject of how to get the most out of a 1 to 4 gb system. Like zram, alternative to ssh and shell.
I have a video on zram if that is of any use to you: th-cam.com/video/RLIAX6L5O5w/w-d-xo.html
Surprisingly both the 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Alpine Linux use about the same amount of RAM, at least in my experience.
@zoomosis but then we must take all applications we want to run as well. I think it was on the youtube channel 'explaining computers' who have made a comparison between 32 and 64 bit.
Might be interesting to see how RAM hungry a Cosmic desktop distro is as it matures...
Why didn't you include window managers like i3wm?
😂 Brilliant.
DietPI with docker installed: 340 Mb. Nice.
Good on you for skipping Fedora! Red Hat's treatment of CentOS was far from community centered! I was never a big fan of RH either. SuSE 4 life 😂 And yes, I really do love SuSE! I'm not sure it's super lightweight, but I have had great luck using it as a desktop system, and their KDE support has always been top notch. Sorry for being off topic slightly 😂
I support his decision too.
I'm also still baffled that people recommend Fedora to new users. Fedora, while being quite polished and overall a big contributor to moving things forward, I think it's terrible for a new user because they're so happy to adopt new stuff and remove old stuff, even if the old one was working fine. Even if it breaks workflows. That means that people might find themselves not being able to upgrade without having things break. Or upgrading and having things break.
Thank you for this. I just upgraded linux mint (xfce) to 22 and im definitely seeing the toll on my old laptop versus version 20 (xfce). Im not too sure whats up.. might give lubuntu a try.
Is there a Linux version suitable for a gaming lounge or classroom?
Nobara is good for gaming and tweaked for it. POP!_OS is another but not that familiar with it.
Another vote for pop Os it's great for Nvidia compatibly... Though bazite seems to be the go to for a lot now. But that's arch Vs Debian really
Tried Clearlinux by intel?
😂
@@GaryExplains didn't heard of it right😂
No. It is just that I asked specifically in the video to not post comments about distros I didn't test (other than to recommend them, which is what I asked at the end of the video).
@@GaryExplainsoh missed that 😂
Next head over to the Internet Archive and grab yourself a copy of a mid-90s Debian, RH, Slackware, SuSE, Mandrake, ... CD ISO, the file size will be a few hundred MB, the kernel will require less than 4MB of RAM, X will start if you have 8MB of RAM, with about the same in swap space. Then play spot the difference between the cmd line tools, and Xeyes, XPilot, xv, ... versions available in the mid 90s, and required a hundredth of the resources of their present iterations.
I did a video about installing Slackware from the 1990s a few years ago.
@@GaryExplains You could have a play to see how much you could shrink the memory footprint, of a current distribution, if you were to recompile the kernel without USB-4, WiFi, bluetooth, webcam, touch input, asymmetric CPU type support, anything more than SVGA graphics, ... , and compare to the memory foot print of a mid-90s distribution, that only offered kernel modules for your wired NE2000 NIC, S3 graphics, Soundblaster, PS2 mouse and keyboard, if you were lucky.
@AndrewRoberts11 While that could be fun, I don't think the amount of effort it would require vs the number of people who would watch that video, would mean it would be worthwhile!
@@GaryExplains Many enterprises run custom kernels, if not full stacks, with the ~35 years of kernel module bloat pruned (there was that a.out to ELF reworking of the Kernel around 94). Have a play at recompiling the kernel with all the unused filesystems dropped, unused hardware modules dropped, ... , of your chosen VM. You should end up with a smaller kernel, that's also quicker to compile.
@@AndrewRoberts11 I would love to see things like that, especially since I'm curious what's taking up the extra space.
But Gary has a diverse range of topics, he doesn't have the time to do deep dives like that.
🤩🤩
Is RAM even a good metric? I don't think it's even a good metric for Windows.
Good metric for what? Estimating how many can spin up on a specific piece of hardware ... yes.
@@htpc002Weirdhouse Only if RAM is the limiting factor. Also, this wasn't strictly about VMs and containers, but also about desktops.
@@graealex RAM often _is_ the limiting factor, especially when it comes to portable computers, like laptops.
@@marioprawirosudiro7301 In the context of laptops, we're usually talking about desktop OS, and then other stuff starts to limit you. MacOS is a great example - it does use significant memory, but the rest of the OS is very optimized, so it runs very smooth.
Or for Linux DEs, being GPU-accelerated makes a big difference in how smooth the GUI will operate. This was even an issue on Windows 7 - using the classic interface over Aero would, despite the simplistic look, make the GUI significantly slower, because without the DWM, stuff would need constant redraws.
@@graealex Yes, desktop OS. On a machine with 8 gigs _soldered-on_ memory (lots of modern laptops, especially those based on Ryzen 7xxx series). Of which around 2 gigs or so would be allocated for VRAM - meaning we only have around 6 gigs to play around with. If the distro itself takes 2 gigs on fresh boot, that's 4 gigs left. At this point, let's hope the user doesn't open too many tabs while browsing...
GPU acceleration would not be the bottleneck here. It's the constant back and forth swapping due to lack of memory.
Linux Mint with either Cinnamon or XFCE remain my top recommendations for new users; being a guy with one foot in the Windows world, I usually found KDE or LXQt desktop environments to be a bit more comfortable than GNOME. (Also, Fedora + GNOME eats about as much RAM as Windows 10)
If you want to really drop the RAM usage, logging out of your full desktop and into a window manager like IceWM can free up some resources for more demanding tasks (and you can still open up your full desktop apps if necessary).
So much for: "I use Debian because Ubuntu is bloated." 7:27
My most budget laptop uses a 6W Pentium Silver N5030 with 4 core/threads and has 4GB of RAM, although Conky says it is only 3.65GB. My EndeavourOS Cinnamon uses 1GB (27%) to boot. I've given it 8GB of Swap, although it rarely uses any of it (none for booting). This setup is very usable. My Win10/11 ECS Liva QC710 (Snapdragon 7c), which also has only 4GB of RAM, was unusably slow, extremely anemic. Guessing the N5030 is also more powerful than the Snapdragon 7c, so perhaps an unfair comparison.
Fedora is fat, but Red Hat was one of the companies that gave US$2M to the One Laptop Per Child project so that is what they used. They quickly went from 128MB in the first generation prototypes to 256MB in the production model in order to deal with this and Microsoft was able to squeeze Windows XP into this expanded memory. This caused Negroponte to say he had been wrong to say that open source would allow them to have lower cost hardware than commercial software, but he was wrong about being wrong - just use a Linux that isn't Fedora!
God bless you. I love your stance on Fedora.
BASED take on Fedora ❤
Some say that unused memory is wasted memory.
I did a test with the three versions of Mint 21.3 installed with the needed drivers and the desktop idle, no apps open. Xfce used 1.1 GB, MATE 1.3 GB, Cinnamon 1.8 GB. The Mac laptop used 3.5 GB with Sonoma, huge overhead although it does preload whatever it thinks you might want to do next.
My mint 20.3 XFCE idles with nothing open at around 540MB's.. .. add in hexchat and some pulse effects (my audio setup is a bit strange) and it gets to the mid 600's..
Just use an enterprise system like openindiana
How can you call OpenIndiana an Enterprise System, when you know that "OpenIndiana is a distribution developed and maintained by a community of volunteers." Volunteers != Enterprise.
No Arch? Tux is not amused. :)
😂
Interesting. Here's some random mentions:
- I support Gary in not testing Fedora. Other than the ethical reasons, I'm still baffled that people recommend it to new users, which might be a setup for later frustrations when upgrading to a new Fedora could break important workflows for an user. Or the update to not work. Fedora is too happy to embrace new stuff and ditch working "old" stuff to be a safe option for someone who is not aware and ok with this approach.
- a bit weird that there were 3 tests on XFCE and only one on KDE. And also 3 on GNOME. By popularity, usage, features, it should be more like 3 GNOME, 3 KDE and 2 XFCE. Or at the very least one more KDE instead of a 3rd XFCE
- a bit out of scope for this video, but it's important to know that different distros and desktop environments (and flavours/spins/profiles) come with different things supported, availabile and installed. Hence the different RAM usage. You might find yourself that if you take one of the ligher distro and add the things you want on top, you might end up using more RAM than another distro that maybe had those things you wanted already installed and possibly optmized. Or missing something else that you don't need and recoup some RAM and disk space there.
In truth, if you know what you want and configure everything as you want and need, you'll probably reach the same RAM usage on all distros, as you'll effectively eliminate the differences.
So, if you care about how much RAM you use (like maybe you have an old laptop and it only has 4 GB of RAM), then after picking a distro (which you shouldn't spend too much time on) you should learn what you have installed and what you use out of it, and what you actually need, so you can know what to remove/uninstall or change.
- a minor thing, but having a higher desktop resolution (when using any GUI) adds up a bit on RAM usage. Don't have exact figures, but it should be pretty minimal, like several MB to a couple hundred MBs
- if anyone is happening to read this, I would like to mention one distro that allows you somewhat easily to control what you use and to tune to quite a high degree the kernel and all the apps you install on your system: Gentoo. The thing with Gentoo is that the norm is to compile every app you install (though you have precompiled options too, especially for the big apps like browsers which can take a lot to compile).
Now, you can compile an app on any distro, but Gentoo streamlines it. And also allows to further customize by a thing called "USE flags". With these you basically give compiler options. And with these you can compile exactly for your system. And exactly what you need and want out of it (well, as much as the use flags allow, which is dependent on who made the package in that repo). And Gentoo allows for more advanced things, like LTO (link time optimization).
For example you can have the app compiled exactly for your new processor, without the need to have it supported to work on a Core 2 Duo, so you can use more advanced CPU instructions.
You can have it compiled specifically just for X or just for Wayland, not both, since you only use X or only use Wayland. Lastly, you can, say compile without bluetooth support, since your desktop doesn't have bluetooth.
The same for the kernel. Now, to be fair, using another kernel, or compiling it yourself is not exactly something unique with Gentoo. It just happens more statistically, since people using Gentoo are already in the customizing mentality. There's a lot of things you can not use, as compared to a generic kernel, if you tune it to your system (so you can remove a lot of drivers that you won't use since you simply don't have those devices). Are you only using XFS and nothing with ext4, btrfs, bcachefs and all that jazz ? Well, you can only have xfs in your kernel. And so on. Having a smaller kernel impacts how much RAM it needs. It can also very slightly boost your boot speed, if it's smaller.
Really interesting. I switched from Debian to Arch Linux largely because it's easier to install the latest version of various packages using yay. I also started using msys2 on Windows VM's because WSL breaks due to nested virtualization. msys2 also uses pacman. Alpine does look interesting for containers--I haven't heard of it.
if you want light then ToyBox Linux is pretty good.
What about TempleOS?
😂
TempleOS is so divine, you don't need to concern yourself with RAM usage. Just having a 64bit processor.
My work uses alpine in build pipelines. Each run effectively recreates the build environment from nothing in docker, which means copying 30 MB alpine vs 200 MB Centos adds up timewise.
Thing is, the build server is running dozens of jobs at once so “start, run the stuff stuff, copy the build artifacts, close” cycle needs to be tight
Down load side is totally un related to the run time size as is a container memory foot print, for containers you need to include the host OS memory foot print.
This Linux comparison is most interest and informative.
I sometimes use Tom's Root Boot since it fits into a single floppy disk. It hasn't been updated since 2002 and is kernel 2 and command line with not much functionality, but for old machines it gets the job done. For slightly newer machines a live CD-ROM is better, and even newer a USB drive or SD card.
Surely the init system is going to play a part in the ram usage. Which is why I like runit as if feels lighter than systemD.
My favourite distro is Void Linux.
My prefered distro is ANTIX
Pure linux (aka only the kernel)
i ask myself why browsers use so much ram to render a page.
Microsoft Linux 3.0. Of course, no desktop available in the repo.
edit: Oh, you are probably calling it "Azure Linux" 👍
He even had a video about it a few days ago.
Gary... JWM 😉
i was looking oracle linux but it wasn't ther, 😂
Is that Bubbly Bubbly Oracle Linux or standard Oracle Linux? 😂
What do you meant with "Containers"?
Try here for starters en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containerization_(computing) and then try linuxcontainers.org/
OpenBSD 7.5 upon booting to the TWM desktop uses 74 Megabytes.
I suppose BSD is technically not linux, but good to know.
@@bertblankenstein3738 Well, not just "technically". It is not Linux.
Say that to BSD users, and you'll offend them harder than if you directly insult their parents.
Windows compared to Android is same as fluorescent light bulb compared to incandescent one. Linux (with GUI) is a LED then.
Seriously, why does phone system need to use 6 to 8 GB of RAM on idle ? And each openex app near 200-500 MB minimum ? I thought it was supposed to be efficient.
I have several videos about Android RAM usage, they might help answer your question.
@@GaryExplains those were all rhetorical questions.
Android has the worst RAM allocation model and overhead in the world, and I just don't get, why Google doesn't focus on performance and efficiency in comparatively"weak" mobile devices.
We need UEFI and consequently easily installed Linux in our phones, not yet another virtualization layer and usage limitations (bye side loading ?).
As I said, those videos will help. It has nothing to do with Linux.
Love your take on Fedora!
You couldn't be more correct!
Glad you think so! 👍
You've compared Debian with a few others here, but not with the installed commandline-only version, which is the one I mostly use. Why is this?
😂
@@GaryExplains That's not a constructive answer…
It is when you consider what I said in the video already.
I use Arch with dwm
Would have been a good comparison to state MS Windows usage after boot and login.
Also would have been nice to see Pop OS with Cosmic figures.