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.)

I am amazed to discover that Xfce of that era was so CDEsque: https://www.linux.co.cr/desktops/review/2000/xfce-3.3/help.h...
  • ch_123
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It was originally created as a CDE clone (thus the original name "XForms Common Environment")
That would have been then already some kind of anachronism. 8MiB RAM was workable (but only barely so with X11) in the early nineties. Late nineties 64MiB or more were common.
My first PC had 16 MB of RAM, which later obviously became too slow to be usable. I remember I had to wait around a minute for Fallout to load a level, which you had to do fairly frequently.
  • riedel
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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.
I doesn’t feel like that long ago when I built a swarm of Arch Linux based thin clients which PXE booted from a SLES DHCP & NFS host.

That was probably around 2010 or 2015.

Those images had to run on a thin client with 512 MB RAM.

I think I chose XFCE as the DE.

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.

Me too, but I was able to do it around 1995-1996 :) Also remember Windows95 can boot with 4MB of RAM, and was decent with 12MB.
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.

Windows 95 on a 386 CPU with enough RAM was alright. Not fast but very useable.

https://youtu.be/Pw2610paPYM?t=72

But most 386 didn't have 8+ megabytes, and some 386 had a 286 like data bus, making it even slower. (386SX)

I don’t know how resolution maps to ram in x11 but I assume at least one byte per pixel. Based on that assumption, there’s no chance you’d even be able to power a 4k monitor with 8mb of ram, let alone the rest of the system.
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Presumably every pixel is 32 bits rather than just 8. So the count starts at 33.2MB just for the display.
It is now, but back then it was 1 byte, with typical resolutions being 800x600. There were high-color modes but for a period it was rare to have good enough hardware for it.
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I have run x11 in 16-color and 256-color mode, but it was not fun. The palette would get swapped when changing windows, which was quite disorienting. Hardware that could do 16-bit color was common by the late 90s.
Much better to stick to 1 bit per pixel. :-)

Like in Sun SPARCStation ELC. No confusing colors or shades.

Damn pixel bit-depth bloat!
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?

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> Coyuld anyone summarize why a desktop Windows/MacOs now needs so much more RAM than in the past

Just a single retina screen buffer, assuming something like 2500 by 2500 pixels, 4 byte per pixel is already 25MB for a single buffer. Then you want double buffering, but also a per-window buffer since you don't want to force rewrites 60x per second and we want to drag windows around while showing contents not a wireframe. As you can see just that adds up quickly. And that's just the draw buffers. Not mentioning all the different fonts that are simultaneously used, images that are shown, etc.

(Of course, screen bufferes are typically stored in VRAM once drawn. But you need to drawn first, which is at least in part on the CPU)

I am wondering if, with memory and storage prices skyrocketing, there will be more effort on making computing use less resources?
> 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 ?

...all of those and more? New software is only optimized until it is not outright annoying to use on current hardware, it's always been like that and that's why there are old jokes like:

    "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away."

    "Software is like a gas, it expands to consume all available hardware resources."

    "Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster"
...etc..etc... variations of those "laws" are as old as computing.

Sometimes there are short periods where the hardware pulls a little bit ahead for a few short years of bliss (for instance the ARM Macs), but the software quickly catches up and soon everything feels as slow as always (or worse).

That also means that the easiest way to a slick computing experience is to run old software on new hardware ;)

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

Can your "one issue" be tweaked by adding more RAM and allocating it thusly?

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.

I have several old nuc's and I might try tinycore on one. What do you or most others use it for, primarily?

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

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!
While this is cool, it all goes out the window the minute you run any app
Exactly. The issue today is that even if you optimize your OS and DE to be very memory efficient, it matters very little as soon as you open a modern web browser. And without a modern web browser a big part of the online experience is broken.
Beautifully, blissfully broken
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?
Running Alpine Linux with a minimal window manager gives me similar RAM usage, about 150MB
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...
Odd little rant suddenly appears in the middle of it :D

Here is how I set up minimal Desktop, WATCH 4 VIDEOS ABOUT HOW DEI IS KILLING OPEN SOURCE PROJECTS, and here is my loader.conf ...

Why should I care though?
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.

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Indeed. Xenocara would be a better bet. But the more these people have to collaborate with different people, the more empathy they will need.

https://git.sr.ht/~rabbits/fashware

About Nemo (Fran J. Ballesteros from plan9/9front) he has half as encuse as he grew up (for sure) under the Francoist regime probably from the loaded family side, and, thus, he had to swallow tons of literal extreme right wing ideology even at school (Franco's regime). But the point on being a conspiranoid about the Covid... I would expect more sanity from the mindset from a guy perfectly abled in algoritmics, math and by proxy, science. Echo chambers create these kinds of idiots even on really smart people (the far right in Spain used cult like mechanics too), and I'm sure Fran changed a bit over time for the better.

On the Cosmopolitan/APE person, I remind you that if you want to get back to Reissanance times, I'm a Spaniard, and thus, your whole ideology pales against the Iberian Humanism from the School of Salamanca, where at the time we were the Enlightened ones and you were just a bunch of WASP uneducated hicks living in filthy villages in the middle of Europe.

Back to 9intro, even if you dislike ~nemo, 9intro it's still worth to learn programming on 9front, it's a great book to share and learn from. If would be a waste to ditch it just because some old fart doesn't get into the times.

EDIT: ok, now I see ~nemo it's not that old, so a plausible indoctrination from the Francoism wouldn't apply there; but I'm pretty sure being a conspiranoid on Covid doesn't look like the normal socialization out there.

opens blog post

sees lunduke

closes blog post

seriously, what's with people's love of this guy? besides politics, I have not seen anything that suggests engineering prowess from this guy, only "rust bad".
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.
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? :)

For us not in the know, why is this bad?

Is he ""bigoted"" ? :(

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

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what's especially strange to me is that in the more distant past, he was a pretty normal guy - at least as normal as any other linux user. Heck, he had a super great podcast (Linux Action Show).

Something changed in the 2014ish time-frame when it got more and more politically extreme.

Whatever I might agree or disagree with, this is annoying to look at, but his stuff keeps coming up in my YouTube feed. Even it looks slightly interesting, I know it will be some rant involved about a thing not related to technology, but some developer's personal opinions on non-tech ideas. I get it - people are horrible! Sheesh!

FWIW, probably not much, he said he had a Jewish background ... in, like, the one video I watched and eventually gave up on.

> NeoFetch But in Rust and More Gay

apt-install --fuck-yes gay-rust-neofetch

I’ll look to migrate to chimera shortly, but only if it includes gay neofetch.

* Are Jews the Cause of DEI in Big Tech?

...errrrrrrrrrrrrr, plot twist, he is a jew himself, or at least he claimed he is.

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

I kinda wanna try linux again...

it gets better every day
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oh wow! this looks cool, let me click.

annnd its another XLibre shill proselytising.

For us not in the know, why is this bad?
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nice, now open a web browser and any modern website /s