My daily driver is a 10 year old dell running an i5, 16GB of RAM, and a
SSD. It runs stock Kubuntu 22.04.
$ free -h
total used free shared buff/cache
available
Mem: 15Gi 3.4Gi 8.4Gi 958Mi 3.7Gi
10Gi
Swap: 2.0Gi 0B 2.0Gi
keith@Kubuntu22:~$
I have a FF browser open with 10 tabs in use. I have 2 Libre Office
spreadsheets open, and Thunderbird running. It does well until I open
too many browser tabs.
My other machine is an 8 year old laptop that has a 2 core / 4 thread
CPU, 16GB of RAM, a 256GB M.2, and a 500GB spinner. It runs Windows 10.
I use it for creating videos because my video editor is Windows only. I
run win10, Camtasia video editor, VirtualBox, one Ubuntu server VM, and
Putty.
When I check utilization I find it is using less than 9GB of RAM and the
CPU is at about 70%.
In the past I tried running a LAMP stack at 1GB of RAM and it kept
crashing when doing simple things. I find 1 vCPU and 2GB of RAM is the
minimum.
I am shocked at how much RAM a modern desktop needs to run effectively.
Seems the real problem is the modern browsers.
Keith
On 2024-07-17 13:36, Steve Litt via PLUG-discuss wrote:
> Keith Smith via PLUG-discuss said on Mon, 15 Jul 2024 16:18:33 -0700
>
>> This is the Linux I know!!
>>
>> https://www.zdnet.com/article/want-to-save-your-old-computer-try-these-5-linux-distributions/
>
> The last time they made a computer with less than 1GB RAM was the
> bargain basement computers from 2007. Normal computers of that time
> came with 2GB or 4GB.
>
> I think any distro can be made to exist within 1GB RAM. Just use a
> lightweight user interface like Openbox, IceWM, ctwm, fvwm, and
> probably many others. If you want a desktop environment, LXDE or LXQt
> are tiny.
>
> Then use a small browser like surf or luakit. I think even Chromium
> will fit into 1GB if you use only one tab and don't browse to a site
> with insane amounts of Javascript. Mutt, Alpine, Claws-Mail are good,
> lightweight email clients. Use Inkscape or drawing.
>
> The advantage of mainstream distros like Devuan, Debian, Void, Gentoo,
> Funtoo and others is that they have a full compliment of application
> packages. Last time I tried Puppy Linux (which was a long time ago), it
> had few packages.
>
> Just for fun I took my Void VM, set it to use 512MB, and ran it. I
> installed Chromium and Libreoffice, ran Chromium, enabled Chromium's
> memory saver, and pulled up both Buick.Com and Ford.Com, both are pigs.
> Then I created a small Libreoffice file.
>
> When browsing, the computer was noticeably slow and jerky, but we *are*
> talking about 512MB here. I don't know whether I could have *installed*
> Void with only 512MB, but I sure could run it. I installed it with 1MB
> just fine. By the way, when I set it down to 256MB, the VM failed to
> boot.
>
> In wealthy nations like US, UK, and EU, it would be bizarre to find
> somebody running a computer with less than 1GB of RAM, so I think those
> tiny versions are aimed for people in third world countries. If you
> have 1GB RAM you can run almost any distro if you carefully curate your
> applications. Almost all desktops and laptops made in the last 10 years
> have at least 4GB RAM.
>
> SteveT
>
> Steve Litt
>
> http://444domains.com
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