Used to build “little old lady” computers for neighbors and such. Say someone gave me their shit PC to fix. Fine. Throw in whatever extra hardware I had, clean it up, new thermal paste and whatnot, small SSD, Linux Lite, Chrome, “Here’s how you get email and internet.” Never once heard from them again.
Here’s the secret sauce; I never once mentioned “linux” or even began explaining what I had done. No need to talk OS, it was “windows” to them! I was there to fix computers, not evangelize.
As long as you “put the internet on the desktop”, most boomers won’t know the difference. I got my dad a new laptop and he asked me to “install Google maps on it”. I put firefox on his desktop and changed the icon to a Microsoft Edge icon and that was easier to do than try to explain what a browser is and that he should use a different one.
The RAM impact of the OS is nothing compared to that of modern apps which are all browser-based.
True, but if you are starved for ram, then minimizing the OS use gives more for the rest of the bloated apps you cannot control.
Just use the tui-alternative (implemented in Rust, of course). /j
me remembering my first computer with 4mb of ram and 250mb of hard disk space.
Mine first had 3K of RAM. An afternoon of coding would jam it out and I had to go back to remove spaces to save a byte.
`10 peek, poke, whatever
`10peekpokewhatever
The fact that one can use a wm/compositor to make the desktop lighter is sick. I was using 350MB idle with Alpine + River, it is so damn snappy.
I came to Linux for freedom and stayed for the performance.
Let me intoduce you to sub 100MB idle on OpenBSD with BSPWM (80~90MB)
Damn, how low can one even go?
640K of memory should be enough for anybody.
I had a GUI on a computer with 256kB RAM on no hdd.
I wrote a WIMP based gui on a ZX81 with 1Kb RAM, drop down menus used XORing, used keys to move cursor as no mouse back then, trouble was to make it useful for programs had to increase ram much higher like 16Kb, I used machine code and especially for low level graphics code, was fun to do 🤣
Believe it or not due to third world issues I went with all of uni and part of my graduated life (2008-2016/17) with a crappy Intel Pavilion DV2000 which had Core2Duo and 3GB on RAM. With Gentoo. It went just fine for most daily stuff and some of my work as a graphic designer.
Why use gentoo ? Was it worth it performance wise ?
No that I could tell, but mostly because before it I used to use Ubuntu, and got fed trying to uninstall stuff I didn’t actually need and it attempted to yolo a whole bunch of packages with it. It didn’t had much storage either (120 GB) so that mattered a bit; but mostly because I didn’t had internet at home (or when I could had it, it was completely shit - a 3G modem)
Trying to update Ubuntu offline was a huge pain in the ass: I needed to go to an internet cafe nearby, or at uni, and download the packages for the updates one by one (searching them in packages.ubuntu, going to the results page, picking the distro, picking architecture…), burned them to a CD or copied them onto a usb stick and went back home to install them… only for it to tell me it was now needing some other bunch of packages, so rinse and repeat. I could do that even like 3 or 4 more times to update just a single frigging app - it was that or having wait for a new Ubuntu release, and soon Ubuntu would end that program where they sent people an original Ubuntu CD to their address completely for free.
Whereas with Gentoo it already had the --fetchonly flag so you could just ran emerge with it and it would tell you absolutely everything you needed, so I could parse that output with sed or something and go to another computer with an internet connection and download them with some other tool, everything at once. I could then bring them home and update the thing in a single command. Of course it could take time to compile stuff but the updating process was much easier to me. So think like a IP over Avian Carriers situation.
Ugh… do you even -O3?
I am honestly amazed at how efficient puppy linux is, firefox is pretty usable on a 2gb (originally) windows XP machine.
My Ubuntu install would beg to differ. It’s a dog at 4gig
Well that’s because you’re using a bloated distro. That’s the cost of all those features.
My laptop, at 1.5 gigs of RAM, is blazing fast and has a smooth UX with a Debian+i3wm install.
The meme said Linux, it didn’t specify a distro.
Nixe goalpost move though.
Okay, Jimmy Neutron. The meme said Linux, it did not specify that it was a Linux-based OS. The kernel uses a roughly similar amount of memory, it’s all the other crap in userspace that makes the difference.
If you want to be a pedant, get it right next time.
What goalpost you potato? What was said basically amounts to “your experience differs because of (completely optional customizations)”
Blazing fast as long as you are only text editing and dont open a web browser.
Works fine with Firefox, but yes. That’s 90% of what I do at a PC.
Braindead responses and honestly probably just bait anyone passing through, ignore this fool. Ubuntu base install(gnome), in my experience uses less than 2gb of ram at idle. (Even less when using xfce or lxqt) Dummy added bloat to his system and then came on here to bitch about nothing. either that or hes a bot, troll or both.
@cm0002 excellent for people who only run vim 😂
