NetBSD + xfce is also decent in this scenario

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

I've used it for mostly system rescue operations but it can do much more. Look at the package list for possibilities.

If the system totally freezes such that you can't even ssh in, that's just flaky hardware and you should replace it.

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)

I mean fzf might help?

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)?

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.

Beautifully, blissfully broken

Unused RAM is usually used by the page cache in modern OSs.

Yes, I remember making my 12" IBM monitor scream as I put the wrong mode information in the config file for X. I think I was on RedHat 5.0 from a cover CD, on a 486 DX2 with 64 MB of RAM (I was poor; everyone else was on Pentium IIs or IIIs and I was using computers the school threw out, scraping together motherboards and RAM).

Yeah, it was a different world. I worked at a company using X + Motif on SCO Unix back in the early 90s. I had a 386sx with 8mb ram + 6 MB on an ISA expansion card! When you changed a header file constant (like a label string) and had to recompile the ~1 MB(!) executable, it really was coffee break time - compile time was ~1 hour for a full rebuild. Strangely enough, our current project on a 16-core VM also takes nearly an hour for a full rebuild - but we have parallel build options that go much faster.

I also ran Linux+X11 on my 486 (for some grad work) with 32 MB, IIRC. ATI Mach32 graphics card, Nec 5FGe monitor (loved that one!), etc..

It was originally created as a CDE clone (thus the original name "XForms Common Environment")

Yes, it was an old laptop at the time.

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.

I remember buying a bulky external 2MB RAM extension (I think I bought another 2MB) before that for my Amiga 500 running a full desktop OS already on 512k 'Chipmemory' using it mostly to actually as a TempFS to accelerate loading. That was beginning to mid 90s, I guess. But running netbsd on the Amiga meant that you would already at that time need 16MB of RAM and a CPU with an MMU as well as an HDD (my friend across the street did that with his A1200 I think I remember). You would only do it if you wanted more networking beyond BBS I guess.

4 minutes to load Enclave level save game with pentium 200mhz with 32mb ram

Windows95 was decent even with 8 MB, on a 66 MHz or 100 MHz 486 CPU.

With either 4 MB or only a 386 CPU, it was definitely crippled, making an upgrade not worthwhile.

This was the main driver of VGA memory size for a time - if you spent money on 2MB card instead of a 1MB, you could have higher resolution or bit depth.

if you had a big enough framebuffer in your display adapter, though, X11 could display more than your main ram could support - the design, when using "classic way", allowed X server to draw directly on framebuffer memory (just like GDI did)

Correct, 4k is very modern by these standards. But then I'm old, so perhaps it's all about perspective.

Back in the days when computers had 8MB of RAM to handle all that MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 goodness, we were still in the territory of VGA [0], and SVGA [1] territory, and the graphics cards (sorry, integrated graphics on the motherboard?! You're living in the future there, that's years away!), had their own RAM to support those resolutions and colour depths.

Of course, this is all for PCs. By the mid-1990s you could get a SPARCstation 5 [2] with a 24" Sun-branded Sony Trinitron monitor that was rather more capable.

[0] Maxed out at 640 x 480 in 16-colour from an 18-bit colour gamut

[1] The "S" is for Super: 1280 x 1024 with 256 colours!

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation_5

X11 was designed to support bit depths down to 1 bit per pixel.

Presumably every pixel is 32 bits rather than just 8. So the count starts at 33.2MB just for the display.

Good thing 4k monitors didn't exist in 2000

Per window double buffering is actively harmful - as it means you're triple buffering, as the render goes window buffer->composite buffer->screen, and that's with perfect timing, and even this kind of latency is actively unpleasant when typing or moving the mouse.

If you get the timing right, there should be no need for double-buffering individual windows.

You don't need to do all of this, though. You could just do arbitrary rendering using GPU compute, and only store a highly-compressed representation on the CPU.

Indeed. Much of a modern Linux desktop e.g. runs inside one of multiple not very well optimized JS engines: Gnome uses JS for various desktop interactions, and all major desktops run a different JS engine as a different user to evaluate polkit authorizations (so exactly zero RAM could be shared between those engines, even if they were identical, which they aren't), and then half your interactions with GUI tools happens inside browser engines, either directly in a browser, or indirectly with Electron. (And typically, each Electron tool bundles their own slightly different version of Electron, so even if they all run under the same user, each is fully independent.)

Or you can ignore all that nonsense and run openbox and native tools.

Unlikely. If you can't afford RAM, how can you afford the SaaS contracts that keep devs employed?

Ye gods, that's a lot. I run Xfce on Alpine on plain old ext4 and get 200MB or so used.

> I am glad for the RAM prices, maybe this will teach a new generation on how to care about their data structures again.

I have been thinking that exact same thought recently.

I hope prices stay elevated for a few years, so people learn to be a bit more frugal with resources.

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

> I have an ancient laptop from 2008 with 4GB of ram that runs a modern KDE desktop

Try Alpine Linux, with Xfce which can do most of the same things. Then enable swap compression -- add this to the end of the kernel line in your bootloader:

zswap.enabled=1

This compresses everything going to swap, and decompresses it coming back: less disk reads and writes, and less space used.

Everything gets quicker.

People are saying that 8GB for Android phone is too small. All of those applications are not electron either.

There is bloat everywhere.

4GB still seems excessive, by at least one and probably several orders of magnitude, for what vanilla KDE actually does: browse files, manage windows, and edit text. And KDE is one of the best modern options.

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.

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.

Of chip RAM, too!

And for many scenarios people use their computers for, it would still be enough today.

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...

It was perfectly viable to have multiple apps open and flip between them. It ran for weeks on a pair of AA batteries.

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.

Because his contributions are bad... Not because anyone has an agenda.

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.

I think he did a good job with a report on Mozilla's spendings. Also in general he shows a lot of cases of hypocrisy in the modern software industry.

He is an influencer if you will.

Skilled enough but the main use is as a news resource like this. The guy ion the blog would not have found out about this unless Lunduke posted about it.

Do you understand? :)

People like his technical opinion because they like his politics. That’s the whole grift-influencer economy. If someone is good at one thing (and validates some of my views), then obviously he’s right about everything.

The maker of the provocative "Linux sucks" series is a bit of a troll. He's made videos on technical projects he doesn't understand (or care about) and just mocks them if they don't gel with him. As far as I can tell he doesn't really care, or if he thinks he does - his actions aren't translating well.

How do I know? As a FOSS developer myself with a decade plus public history I also happen to know a few people running prominent FOSS projects.

He's burned bridges for no good reason. He doesn't care.

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.

He's harassed people, including one of my friends.

Lunduke is a grifter and just generally a bit of an idiot.

e.g. I remember he once claimed Google was censoring him when he was de-listed from search, this was way back in 2009. His site had a malicious iframe because the PHP CMS he was using had been compromised.

His politics are kinda irrelevant to me. There are people who are Agorist/Libertarian/Conservative tech influencers online that do decent and informative content e.g. Sam Bent.

Been over a decade since I used a terminal browser, how do they handle modern websites with javascript?

Xlibre is not really a scam but it isn't much of a serious technical project either. I suppose you could call it a low-effort meme of the typical 4chan variety.

Even ignoring all the politics and crazy stuff from the "maintainer"; most of their contributions were just shuffling code around and causing a lot of breakage. The typical "but this looks nicer so its better" type of programmer, not the type of code I'd rely on personally.

It's not, GNOME-Foundation aka Redhat aka IBM wants to "kill" X11, so they attach labels to discredit a project that wants to maintain X11:

https://en.ubunlog.com/The-XLibre-case-brings-out-the-worst-...

Same old story they try to repeat with DHH or the Framework Laptops because how dare you to support Omarchi:

https://world.hey.com/dhh/calling-someone-a-nazi-is-a-permis...

[flagged]

[flagged]