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200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop

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Re: 200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop

#201

Post by lproven »

kiwijamo wrote: post #183
scrapheap wrote: post #104

200MB for a desktop sounds massive to some of us :D Back in the day I used to have a desktop running, with applications, in just 512KB. Getting that memory upgrade to a full 1MB was amazing.

I used to run Acorn's RISC OS in just 2MB of RAM.

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.

Re: 200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop

#203

Post by FrostViper8 »

lproven wrote: post #197
FrostViper8 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found that Gnome works about as well as other "lighter" desktop environments on some hardware I have that is about 15 years old. I don't think it using a JS engine really impacts performance as much as people claim. Memory usage might be a bit higher, but the main memory hog on a machine these days is your web browser. I have plenty of complaints about gnome (not being able to set a solid colour as a background…

> I find Gnome tends to expose me to less nonsense. IMHO, I find the reverse. It feels like a phone/tablet interface. It's bigger and uses way more disk and memory, but it gives me less UI, less control, less customisation, than Xfce which takes about a quarter of the resources. Example: I have 2 screens. One landscape on the left, one portrait on the right. That big mirrored L-shape is my desktop. I wanted the virtu…

> IMHO, I find the reverse. It feels like a phone/tablet interface. It's bigger and uses way more disk and memory, but it gives me less UI, less control, less customisation, than Xfce which takes about a quarter of the resources.

I've used Xfce quite a lot in the past and quite honestly most of the "customisation" in it is confusing to use and poorly thought out.

I've also found these "light DEs" to be less snappy than Gnome. I believe this is because it takes advantage of the GPU acceleration better, but I am not sure tbh. The extra memory usage I don't really care about. My slowest laptop I use regularly has 8GB ram and it is fine. Would I want to use this on a sub 4GB machine, no. But realistically you can't do much with that anyway.

Also Gnome (with Wayland) does a lot of stuff that Xfce can't do properly. This is normally to do with HiDPI scaling, different refreshrates. It all works properly.

With Xfce, I had to mess about with DPI hacks and other things.

> Example: I have 2 screens. One landscape on the left, one portrait on the right. That big mirrored L-shape is my desktop. I wanted the virtual-desktop switcher on the right of the right screen, and the dock thing on the left of the left screen.

> If I have 1 screen, keep them on 1 screen. If I have 2, that pair is my desktop, so put one panel on the left of my desktop and one on the right, even if those are different screens -- and remember this so it happens automatically when I connect that screen.

I just tried the workspace switcher. I can switch virtual desktops with Super + Scroll on any desktop. I can also choose virtual desktops on both screens by using the Super + A and then there is virtual desktop switcher on each screen.

I just tried it on Gnome 48 on Debian 13 right now. It is pretty close to what you are describing.

> This is the logic I'd expect. It is not how GNOME folks think, though, so I can't have it. I do not understand how they think

I think people just want to complain about Gnome because it is opinionated. I also don't like KDE.

I install two extensions on desktop. Dash to Dock and Appindicators plugins. On the light DEs and Window Managers, I was always messing about with settings and thing always felt off.

Re: 200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop

#204

Post by hun3 »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #2

If someone wants really low ram consumption for a desktop. They should try out tinycorelinux which I have ran the whole system in 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…

The size feels like you can almost fit it in a L3 Cache-As-RAM

Re: 200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop

#205

Post by entropicdrifter »

user3939382 wrote: post #175
al_borland wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I put tinycorelinux on an old laptop a family member was looking to get rid of. It was the only OS I could find that still supported the ancient cpu. It worked ok, but had a bit of a learning curve. I also had to run a couple commands every time I booted it up if I wanted to connect to wifi. I tried to get this to happen automatically, but wasn't having much luck. The password for the network also gets stored in plai…

NetBSD + xfce is also decent in this scenario

I prefer LXQt, uses significantly less RAM than xfce

Re: 200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop

#206

Post by heavyset_go »

FrostViper8 wrote: post #118
heavyset_go wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now I want to make a Woke Linux to drive this guy insane, the CoC alone will make his face melt

It won't do anything of the sort. It will allow him to make 200 videos complaining about it, get a load of ad-revenue and sell subscribestar memberships. The best thing to do with people like Lunduke is ignore them.

Yeah I'm aware, reactionaries are gonna reactionary. I'm just taken aback that anyone's brain would even look at a kernel through that warped lens.

It's always horrible when your niche get poisoned by this rhetoric.

Re: 200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop

#207

Post by OCASMv2 »

pilif wrote: post #51
Mashimo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

His views are the normal ones.

Re: 200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop

#208

Post by anthk »

hn_acc1 wrote: post #177
don-bright wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ran linux in an 8 mb 486 in the 90s. X ran in 256 color mode and twm or mwm were the window managers. It was so hard to use though. Had to setup modelines settings for your monitor in a textfile and theoretically could damage it with wrong iputs. Programming X fuggedabout it - I was from turbo borland msdos land where everything was neatly documented and designed with clear examples to make programming easy. I was lu…

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 nea…

You have no ccache setup for it?

Re: 200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop

#209

Post by FrostViper8 »

heavyset_go wrote: post #206
FrostViper8 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't do anything of the sort. It will allow him to make 200 videos complaining about it, get a load of ad-revenue and sell subscribestar memberships. The best thing to do with people like Lunduke is ignore them.

Yeah I'm aware, reactionaries are gonna reactionary. I'm just taken aback that anyone's brain would even look at a kernel through that warped lens. It's always horrible when your niche get poisoned by this rhetoric.

While I believe Lunduke is a dishonest actor, he is tapping into something.

There are many people in and around tech that disagree with the direction. They want to pushing back against mega corporations, government surveillance etc. They see CoC, Woke as part of that corporate/government apparatus.

You can watch someone like Sam Bent's or Mental Outlaws YouTube channel and you will start to understand that attitude.

> It's always horrible when your niche get poisoned by this rhetoric.

Tech like a lot of areas of life has been hyper politicised. The best thing you can do is not to play the game at all.

Re: 200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop

#210

Post by sergeykish »

zozbot234 wrote: post #195
sergeykish wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name how it's possible to improve security on X11 without breakig changes. Lunduke made factually wrong claims for hype. His mob are keen to attack Open Source developers.

You can use Xephyr or Xnest to sandbox an untrusted or insecure application within its own X11 instance. This gives you the exact same kind of security property that Wayland happens to enforce out of the box for its clients, except that it need not apply to basic desktop components such as the window manager or the desktop panel. You don't even need Xlibre or anything, this stuff has been around for ages. It's not ro…

Xephyr or Xnest sandbox break screensharing, global shortkeys.

You've just confirmed obvious. No way to improve security without breaking changes. And you demand mostly nontechnical users to blacklist applications. That's a recipe for disaster.

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