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200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop

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Re: 200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop

#51

Post by pilif »

Mashimo wrote: post #31
heraldgeezer wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For us not in the know, why is this bad? Is he ""bigoted"" ? :(

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.

Re: 200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop

#52

Post by ch_123 »

blackhaz wrote: post #35
badc0ffee wrote: post #8

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...

It was originally created as a CDE clone (thus the original name "XForms Common Environment")

Re: 200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop

#53

Post by zozbot234 »

actionfromafar wrote: post #50
cout wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1bpp (at low resolution) is still relevant today on epaper screens, though some of them now allow for shades of grey or even color.

Re: 200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop

#54

Post by zozbot234 »

marhee wrote: post #44
giamma wrote: post #12

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 mor…

> 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 wirefram…

You don't need to do all of this, though. You could just do arbitrary rendering using GPU compute, and only store a highly-compressed representation on the CPU.

Re: 200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop

#55

Post by _zagj »

giamma wrote: post #12

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 mor…

They typically also need GPU acceleration, these days, and that can be an even bigger bottleneck, with the drivers often not supporting older cards.

Re: 200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop

#56

Post by p_l »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #28
badc0ffee wrote: post #8

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 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.

This was the main driver of VGA memory size for a time - if you spent money on 2MB card instead of a 1MB, you could have higher resolution or bit depth.

if you had a big enough framebuffer in your display adapter, though, X11 could display more than your main ram could support - the design, when using "classic way", allowed X server to draw directly on framebuffer memory (just like GDI did)

Re: 200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop

#57

Post by zozbot234 »

giamma wrote: post #12

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 mor…

The web browser is the biggest RAM hog these days as far as low-end usage goes. The browsing UI/chrome itself can take in the many hundred megs to render, and that's before even loading any website. It's becoming hard to browse even very "light" sites like Wikipedia on less than a 4GB system at a bare minimum.

Re: 200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop

#58

Post by p_l »

cout wrote: post #47
stavros wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Fun thing - SGI specifically used 256 color mode a lot, to reduce memory usage even if you used 24bit outputs. So long as you used defaults of their Motif fork, everything you didn't specifically request to use more colors would use 256 color visuals which then were composited in hardware.

Re: 200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop

#59

Post by b112 »

actionfromafar wrote: post #50
cout wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But what if it's a UTF8 bit? Then it'd be 2 bits.

Which proves time travel exists, all those "two bits" references in old Westerns.

Re: 200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop

#60

Post by creshal »

flohofwoe wrote: post #37
giamma wrote: post #12

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 mor…

> 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…

Indeed. Much of a modern Linux desktop e.g. runs inside one of multiple not very well optimized JS engines: Gnome uses JS for various desktop interactions, and all major desktops run a different JS engine as a different user to evaluate polkit authorizations (so exactly zero RAM could be shared between those engines, even if they were identical, which they aren't), and then half your interactions with GUI tools happens inside browser engines, either directly in a browser, or indirectly with Electron. (And typically, each Electron tool bundles their own slightly different version of Electron, so even if they all run under the same user, each is fully independent.)

Or you can ignore all that nonsense and run openbox and native tools.

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