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

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.

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!

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

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.)

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

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?

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?

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

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/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/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_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... 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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Cant wait to boot up my Windows 11 total bloat machine at home and work

I kinda wanna try linux again...

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_vaccin...

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

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

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

opens blog post

sees lunduke

closes blog post

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

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"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"