Haha, makes me remember a comment from just the other day on Phoronix flexing that he booted into KDE, and it used only 1.7GB RAM (as a way to prove how lightweight it is).
But on a related note this is the first time I hear of this distro (which doesn't mean an awful lot, maybe I was just living under a rock). I don't really see any big differentiating factor on the home page after a quick glance. Why should one use this instead of other distros? There are a couple available targeting low-end systems
> I don't really see any big differentiating factor on the home page after a quick glance. Why should one use this instead of other distros? There are a couple available targeting low-end systems
Is anyone else doing 32-bit powerpc? More generally, much of my interest in it is that it's a general-purpose distro that targets an amazingly wide array of hardware.
> Haha, makes me remember a comment from just the other day on Phoronix flexing that he booted into KDE, and it used only 1.7GB RAM (as a way to prove how lightweight it is).
Whenever i see such RAM usage scenarios i wonder what exactly is being tested.
Last time i checked, starting my environment had around 300MB of use (or something like that) - but when i measured (and stored) the free memory right before the window manager starts and a bit after, it turned out my window manager (Window Maker) actually only used about 5MB or so. The overwhelming majority of the rest was spread between background processes, many of them before even Xorg had a chance to blit a pixel on screen.
(and FWIW around that time i also checked KDE -it was KDE5 not 6- and its memory usage wasn't much, i don't remember how much it was but was much less than 1.7GB - probably 100-150 MBs or so, IIRC)
My family bought our first own PC in the early 2000s (maybe 2002?) - it came with 128 MB RAM, of which 32 were used by the integrated S3 GPU.
I did install a graphical Linux on the whopping 96 MB RAM, and it did run reasonably well, without any issues that I noticed. (Granted, I deleted it a day or two later, when my 15 years old self wanted to play Diablo2, but couldn't install it on Linux)
I've got a Pentium 166MMX with 80MB of RAM that runs DSL, but you can't do much with it.
In college I used Sun machines that had 8MB of RAM and you could run X. I mostly coded in C. When I think back on those times, I realise you would just run one little thing at a time and that would be great. Nowadays you have a browser open, maybe music playing, a big heavy editor, maybe a database client, VPN, etc.
Really back in the day you could have a windowed Windows desktop on 1MB of RAM. Going further, an Amiga could run a preemptive multitasking windowed environment in 256KB. I know the feature set is different, but OS requirements have become absurd - even for Linux.
But on a related note this is the first time I hear of this distro (which doesn't mean an awful lot, maybe I was just living under a rock). I don't really see any big differentiating factor on the home page after a quick glance. Why should one use this instead of other distros? There are a couple available targeting low-end systems