[HN Gopher] 200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop
___________________________________________________________________
200 MB RAM FreeBSD desktop
Author : vermaden
Score : 174 points
Date : 2026-01-18 08:41 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (vermaden.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (vermaden.wordpress.com)
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 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
| eth0up wrote:
| 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?
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 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
| fenykep wrote:
| I'm not sure if I understood your issue correctly but you
| can persist your configuration with all diskless (os is
| entirely in RAM) OSs as far as I know. This way you
| wouldn't have to install the setup after every reboot. Here
| is the guide for tinycore:
|
| https://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/doku.php?id=wiki:persistence
| _...
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Ah yes sorry forgot about persistence since I played with
| it some long time ago and the details were blurry
|
| yes I probably could do that and most likely would on the
| laptop but I really wanted to tinker with tinycore a lot
| first so I was using the non persistence mode
|
| I will probably do it later when I replace my old mini
| laptop's battery with a new (I think it costs less than a
| $ or so I have heard) but the procastination aspect is
| gonna have me do it to find a good shop around me to have
| the part etc. to probably and I am thinking of doing it
| after a few months but the mini laptop's still in my room
| :) (all be it off)
| zozbot234 wrote:
| If the system totally freezes such that you can't even ssh
| in, that's just flaky hardware and you should replace it.
| eth0up wrote:
| It's a newer Lenovo vpro, not because I wanted that, but
| because it's what I got. It came with 16g of reputable ram,
| then I added 8g ~1 year ago for $20, the exact same module
| which is now $120. Orher than a bad ram chip, what else
| would be the culprit?
| duffyjp wrote:
| I have 64gb in my linux machine and have managed to
| hardlock it a bunch of times exhausting the ram. Couldn't
| even REISUB a couple of times. The OOM killer stuff in
| Linux just doesn't work anymore by what I can gather.
|
| Buying more ram is no longer an option, so I added a
| 128gb swap partition on nvme. I incorrectly assumed with
| 64gb I didn't even need swap. No crashes since.
|
| If you don't want to move partitions around, you can add
| a swap file. ChatGPT or whatever can give instructions.
| dizhn wrote:
| You should consider some sort of swap on ram like zswap
| rather than thrashing your nvme.
| knowitnone3 wrote:
| I've used it for mostly system rescue operations but it can
| do much more. Look at the package list for possibilities.
| al_borland wrote:
| 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 plain text, so there was that. I didn't spend
| too much time on it, since it seemed like it was ultimately
| headed for the recycle bin and they just wanted to make sure
| none of their data was there, but thought if it worked decently
| well, maybe it could still be kept around and used.
| user3939382 wrote:
| NetBSD + xfce is also decent in this scenario
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| > The one issue I have is that I can't copy paste text
|
| With pure X11 you copy paste via primary selection and middle
| click.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Hmm I have always been in the wayland world (KDE,Hyprland
| etc.) but I have been on xfce in mxlinux and I didn't need to
| do primary selection & middle click
|
| I don't know if tinycore supports this. This was my biggest
| grievance because I had to create tmp files paste into it and
| then cat into it or something to work with this pain (which I
| feel like is pretty fixable/ maybe a skill issue from my side
| and honestly wishing for me to learn how to fix it)
| knowitnone3 wrote:
| that one issue sounds like a deal breaker to me. I mean, I copy
| and paste all the time. The one thing I wish tc would do is
| have a searchable package like most distros do instead of
| providing a large text file of all packages. Shouldn't be too
| hard to implement but whatever.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I mean fzf might help?
| joecool1029 wrote:
| 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...
| bboozzoo wrote:
| Why should I care though?
| Mashimo wrote:
| 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.
| Mashimo wrote:
| 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
| ...
| anthk wrote:
| 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.
| shrubble wrote:
| The issue (I think) is that FreeBSD and other non-Linux,
| X11-using distributions are being ignored in the path to using
| Wayland; deprecating X11 has a much broader impact as a result,
| which leads to supporting XLibre which does support X11 and
| does support non-Linux Unices that are running X11.
| mono442 wrote:
| 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?
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| While this is cool, it all goes out the window the minute you run
| any app
| janmalec wrote:
| 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.
| bandrami wrote:
| Beautifully, blissfully broken
| creshal wrote:
| Eh, kinda. Work forces me to have Jira, Confluence, Gitlab,
| Copilot, the other Copilot formerly known as Outlook, the
| other other Copilot formerly known as Teams, as well as Slack
| of course, and a dozen other webslop apps open... and it
| still all fits in <8GB RAM.
|
| Which is a lot worse than the <1GB you'd get with well-
| optimized native tools, but try running Win11 with "only" 8GB
| RAM.
| mghackerlady wrote:
| I'm convinced the next windows GUI will just be an electron
| app that runs copilot as the desktop, forcing you to argue
| with it to open a file or run a program. Doesn't even have
| titlebars or window buttons or a task bar, just one big
| copilot bar at the bottom that you can ask whats already
| running or to close an app. All of this written in
| JavaScript of course
| eikenberry wrote:
| Aren't you optimizing your OS/DE to be memory efficient in
| order to use that memory for other things (like more web
| browser tabs)?
| desdenova wrote:
| Running apps is what RAM should be used for, not wasted on the
| base system.
| jovial_cavalier wrote:
| Unused RAM is wasted. But used RAM is also wasted, sometimes.
| If I can accomplish the same thing with less RAM, that's
| better, because it lets me do other things at the same time. It
| doesn't mean I'm _not_ going to use that RAM, that would be
| pointless. My desktop running dwm typically idles at ~50GiB RAM
| usage from random crap I 've got running. But I can prove that
| the desktop is using no more than like 300MiB.
| yyyk wrote:
| Unused RAM is usually used by the page cache in modern OSs.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Depends if it is Electron crap, or properly native coded.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| 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.)
| hnlmorg wrote:
| 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.
| forinti wrote:
| 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.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| 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.
| argsnd wrote:
| Presumably every pixel is 32 bits rather than just 8. So the
| count starts at 33.2MB just for the display.
| stavros wrote:
| 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.
| cout wrote:
| 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.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Much better to stick to 1 _bit_ per pixel. :-)
|
| Like in Sun SPARCStation ELC. No confusing colors or
| shades.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 1bpp (at low resolution) is still relevant today on
| epaper screens, though some of them now allow for shades
| of grey or even color.
| t-3 wrote:
| Most aren't all that low res either... 300dpi is
| standard.
| b112 wrote:
| 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.
| p_l wrote:
| 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.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Damn pixel bit-depth bloat!
| p_l wrote:
| 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)
| direwolf20 wrote:
| X11 was designed to support bit depths down to 1 bit per
| pixel.
| hulitu wrote:
| X11, yes, but the modern graphics cards, no.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| graphics cards at the time X11 was designed though, yes
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| Correct, 4k is very modern by these standards. But then I'm
| old, so perhaps it's all about perspective.
|
| Back in the days when computers had 8MB of RAM to handle all
| that MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 goodness, we were still in the
| territory of VGA [0], and SVGA [1] territory, and the
| graphics cards (sorry, integrated graphics on the
| motherboard?! You're living in the future there, that's years
| away!), had their own RAM to support those resolutions and
| colour depths.
|
| Of course, this is all for PCs. By the mid-1990s you could
| get a SPARCstation 5 [2] with a 24" Sun-branded Sony
| Trinitron monitor that was rather more capable.
|
| [0] Maxed out at 640 x 480 in 16-colour from an 18-bit colour
| gamut
|
| [1] The "S" is for _Super_ : 1280 x 1024 with 256 colours!
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation_5
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| Good thing 4k monitors didn't exist in 2000
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| My comment was tongue in cheek while simultaneously
| highlighting that at least some increased ram consumption
| is required for modern computing, and highlighting how
| incredibly far technology has come in 2.5 decades.
| guenthert wrote:
| 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.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| Yes, it was an old laptop at the time.
| blackhaz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It was originally created as a CDE clone (thus the original
| name "XForms Common Environment")
| igtztorrero wrote:
| I'm always wanted to know what XFCE means
| stavros wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| iberator wrote:
| 4 minutes to load Enclave level save game with pentium 200mhz
| with 32mb ram
| stavros wrote:
| 32 MB? The opulence!
| daitangio wrote:
| 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.
| adrian_b wrote:
| 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.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| 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)
| badc0ffee wrote:
| On paper a 386sx is slower than a 386dx, and certainly is
| in terms of RAM access. But in practice you'd need some
| expensive hardware to fully take advantage of that speed,
| like EISA cards and a motherboard that supported them
| (or, MCA cards on one of the higher end IBM PS/2 models).
| The typical ISA cards of the era were limited to 8 MHz
| and 16 bits no matter what processor or motherboard you
| used.
|
| The 386dx could also use a full 32-bit address space,
| whereas the 386sx had 24 address lines like the 286. But
| again, having more than 16 MB would have been expensive
| at the time.
| don-bright wrote:
| 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 lucky to get an
| x program to even compile. Hard to find books back then. Pre
| Amazon. Xv image viewer probably the only thing i used X for.
| Actually used the machine most of the time in the text mode
| terminals using alt function keys and used lynx as a browser
| (before javascript... but gopher was becoming obsolete at that
| point... ftp still popular though ) with random assortment of
| svgalib programs for any graphical stuff. Still there was
| something magical about seeing that black and white check
| pattern come up and the little X mouse cursor appear.. like
| there were... possibilities.
| 72deluxe wrote:
| Yes, I remember making my 12" IBM monitor scream as I put the
| wrong mode information in the config file for X. I think I
| was on RedHat 5.0 from a cover CD, on a 486 DX2 with 64 MB of
| RAM (I was poor; everyone else was on Pentium IIs or IIIs and
| I was using computers the school threw out, scraping together
| motherboards and RAM).
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| 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 nearly
| an hour for a full rebuild - but we have parallel build
| options that go much faster.
|
| I also ran Linux+X11 on my 486 (for some grad work) with 32
| MB, IIRC. ATI Mach32 graphics card, Nec 5FGe monitor (loved
| that one!), etc..
| icedchai wrote:
| Back in 1993, I remember booting SLS Linux on a 386 laptop with
| 3 megs of RAM (1 meg on the motherboard, 2 meg expansion.) I
| could barely get it to startx and open an xterm, so I mostly
| used it in from the console!
|
| Before Linux, I was experimenting with Coherent.
| pepperball wrote:
| A few years back, I had fun setting up an old X11 terminal I
| had in my rather eccentric retro computing collection.
|
| But I don't think I had much memory in it. I had ordered a fair
| bit more, but maybe only 4-8M.
|
| I did get it to work with only minor difficulties, but man only
| the simplest of applications could run. The barebones basic GUI
| text editor that came with Ubuntu couldn't even start up.
| giamma wrote:
| 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?
| roywashere wrote:
| I am wondering if, with memory and storage prices skyrocketing,
| there will be more effort on making computing use less
| resources?
| t-3 wrote:
| Unlikely. If you can't afford RAM, how can you afford the
| SaaS contracts that keep devs employed?
| flohofwoe wrote:
| > 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 ;)
| creshal wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| COSMIC is gaining ground as a JS-free alternative to
| current desktops, so hopefully you won't be limited to
| openbox and such.
| creshal wrote:
| Openbox isn't limiting me, Wayland still has no
| advantages for what I do with desktops.
| burner420042 wrote:
| A month with CrunchBang Plus Plus (which is a really nice
| distribution based on Openbox) and you'll appreciate how
| quick and well put together Openbox and text based config
| files are.
| torginus wrote:
| Which is baffling as to why they chose it - I remember
| there being memory leaks because GObject uses a reference
| counted model - cycles from GObject to JS then back were
| impossible to collect.
|
| They did hack around this with heuristics, but they never
| did solve the issue.
|
| They should've stuck with a reference counted scripting
| language like Lua, which has strong support for embedding.
| FrostViper8 wrote:
| 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 colour is really dumb
| IMO), but it seems to work quite well IME.
|
| > Or you can ignore all that nonsense and run openbox and
| native tools.
|
| I remember mucking about with OpenBox and similar WMs back
| in the early 2000s and I wouldn't want to go back to using
| them. I find Gnome tends to expose me to _less_ nonsense.
|
| There is nothing specifically wrong with Wayland either. I
| am running it on Debian 13 and I am running a triple
| monitor setup without. Display scaling works properly on
| Wayland (it doesn't on X11).
| marhee wrote:
| > 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)
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| marhee wrote:
| Yes, but then the GPU needs that amount of ram, so it's
| fairer to look at the sum of RAM + VRAM requirements. With
| compressed representations you trade CPU cycles for RAM. To
| save laptop battery better required copious amounts of RAM
| (since it's cheap).
| torginus wrote:
| Per window double buffering is actively harmful - as it means
| you're triple buffering, as the render goes window
| buffer->composite buffer->screen, and that's with perfect
| timing, and even this kind of latency is actively unpleasant
| when typing or moving the mouse.
|
| If you get the timing right, there should be no need for
| double-buffering individual windows.
| anonnon wrote:
| They typically also need GPU acceleration, these days, and that
| can be an even bigger bottleneck, with the drivers often not
| supporting older cards.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| pjmlp wrote:
| As written on a sibling comment, maybe RAM being hard to get
| will bring some of that back.
|
| I really needed to save to buy RAM sticks back in the day.
| ryan-c wrote:
| _opens blog post_
|
| _sees lunduke_
|
| _closes blog post_
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| For us not in the know, why is this bad?
|
| Is he ""bigoted"" ? :(
| Mashimo wrote:
| 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.
| bigpeopleareold wrote:
| 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.
| FrostViper8 wrote:
| You can just mute/hide a channel from your feed
| permanently.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| > 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.
| stevefan1999 wrote:
| * Are Jews the Cause of DEI in Big Tech?
|
| ...errrrrrrrrrrrrr, plot twist, he is a jew himself, or at
| least he claimed he is.
| pilif wrote:
| 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.
| subsistence234 wrote:
| what do you think changed culturally around 2014 (I'd say
| it started a little earlier, maybe 2011)?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Now I want to make a Woke Linux to drive this guy insane,
| the CoC alone will make his face melt
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Bonus points if you can make it non-binary.
| FrostViper8 wrote:
| 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.
| subsistence234 wrote:
| you're at least 10 years too late with that idea
| ryan-c wrote:
| He's harassed people, including one of my friends.
| eukara wrote:
| The maker of the provocative "Linux sucks" series is a bit of
| a troll. He's made videos on technical projects he doesn't
| understand (or care about) and just mocks them if they don't
| gel with him. As far as I can tell he doesn't really care, or
| if he thinks he does - his actions aren't translating well.
|
| How do I know? As a FOSS developer myself with a decade plus
| public history I also happen to know a few people running
| prominent FOSS projects.
|
| He's burned bridges for no good reason. He doesn't care.
| FrostViper8 wrote:
| Lunduke is a grifter and just generally a bit of an idiot.
|
| e.g. I remember he once claimed Google was censoring him when
| he was de-listed from search, this was way back in 2009. His
| site had a malicious iframe because the PHP CMS he was using
| had been compromised.
|
| His politics are kinda irrelevant to me. There are people who
| are Agorist/Libertarian/Conservative tech influencers online
| that do decent and informative content e.g. Sam Bent.
| snvzz wrote:
| >Lunduke is a grifter...
|
| And somehow you care so much you've created this account
| just to attack him.
|
| I'd suggest going out for a walk.
| FrostViper8 wrote:
| Yes. I created the account because someone asked what the
| problem was with Lunduke and I had something to say. I've
| been aware of Lunduke for quite a while and he has always
| come off a clown.
|
| The fact is that hasn't actually given much to the
| community and has been a drama, pretty much since his
| appearance in Linux land. People used to dislike him then
| and wanted him gone and this was well before the current
| culture war nonsense that is often seen on YouTube,
| Twitter and backwaters like Rumble.
|
| > I'd suggest going out for a walk.
|
| I go out for an hour walk in the countryside every lunch
| time. I am not sure what my exercise routine has got to
| do with criticising a long time troll and grifter.
| undeveloper wrote:
| 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".
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| 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? :)
| wongogue wrote:
| 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._
| dgan wrote:
| Dont present our hypothesis as a hard fact. I actually
| think it is completely false. Not only I was never
| interested in his political opinions, and followed him
| because of his humoristic takes "Linux sucks", and not
| about Rust or whatever; I actually never encountered a
| single video before joining his "lunduke journal" where his
| right-wing views would be visible.
|
| He has made funny videos, it was fun to watch. Its kinda
| hard to enjoy them now after learning he s dumb as a rock
| and justifies killings if you are of tje wrong nationality
| themafia wrote:
| When people feel underrepresented to the point of being
| bullied they turn to any voice which seems to reflect even
| a tiny fraction of their frustrations.
|
| There's a real mean spirit in open source lately and a lot
| of it seems to revolve around political views. There's
| become this idea that if you and I disagree on politics
| then it would be impossible for us to write quality
| software together. It's damaged a lot of good will and
| cohesion that used to exist within the open source software
| community.
|
| This used to be about making free software to people so
| that they weren't abused by corporations. Now it's about
| pushing agendas and creating exclusion criteria. There's
| only one group in this scenario that benefits from this
| outcome.
|
| If you don't like Lunduke then you should recognize the
| factors that give rise to people like him. Unless your
| solution is to completely eliminate anyone who disagrees
| with you then your apparent mindset only furthers the
| problem.
|
| I wish we could put all this aside and just enjoy open
| source again.
| ryan-c wrote:
| My existence is not political. If someone doesn't think I
| should have rights and/or exist and/or thinks I am
| inferior because of who I am, then no, we cannot write
| quality software together.
|
| If someone disagrees with me on tax, foreign relations,
| government services, defense, etc policy, sure, we can
| disagree and still work together.
|
| What gives rise to people like Lunduke is _not_ a simple
| thing, and something I don 't think society fully
| understands.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| In a way, "someone doesn't think I should have rights
| and/or exist and/or thinks I am inferior because of who I
| am" is pretty much the definition of (some kind of)
| politics. All sides play this game, e.g. many extremists
| these days argue that the "intolerant" shouldn't have
| rights or even exist by definition, but then the
| political football becomes who gets labeled as
| "intolerant" to begin with.
|
| (And maybe it's true that those on opposite sides cannot
| work together on good software, but that's easily
| addressed since all FLOSS licenses include the right to
| fork and merge changes.)
| account42 wrote:
| Not agreeing with a particular description or
| categorization of you is not the same as thinking that
| you don't exist and not agreeing that you should have
| certain non-universal rights based on that categorization
| or that you should be able to force others in agreeing
| with your views isn't the same as thinking that you
| shouldn't have rights period.
| sergeykish wrote:
| When people believe "they are product", bully Open Source
| developers for not following their demands and got
| expected response than entities appear that validate
| their wrongs for views (money).
|
| Lunduke spreads misinformation. That's anti Open Source,
| anti community.
| skotobaza wrote:
| I think he did a good job with a report on Mozilla's
| spendings. Also in general he shows a lot of cases of
| hypocrisy in the modern software industry.
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| Cant wait to boot up my Windows 11 total bloat machine at home
| and work
|
| I kinda wanna try linux again...
| undeveloper wrote:
| it gets better every day
| inatreecrown2 wrote:
| Running Alpine Linux with a minimal window manager gives me
| similar RAM usage, about 150MB
| sunshine-o wrote:
| This is quite good !
|
| My Alpine Desktop (Root on ZFS, Wayland/Sway) starts with about
| 550MB
| fredsted wrote:
| 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!
| znpy wrote:
| nice, now open a web browser and any modern website /s
| gambiting wrote:
| I'm sure Lynx would be fine.
| Mashimo wrote:
| Been over a decade since I used a terminal browser, how do
| they handle modern websites with javascript?
| gambiting wrote:
| They don't. Javascript is completely unsupported.
| themafia wrote:
| It should run very quickly given that there are few things
| competing with it for resources like CPU cache space.
|
| It's like "your car is going to get dirty why even wash it?"
| vermaden wrote:
| If you want to stay low on resources you can use Netsurf.
|
| I just started it and loading my
| https://vermaden.wordpress.com/ page used 86 MB of RAM - a lot
| less then Firefox or Chrome.
| snvzz wrote:
| frogfind can be quite helpful.
| solaris2007 wrote:
| A long time ago the power supply blew out in the machine I played
| Counter Strike: Source on and I was a teenager just barely 16
| with no money so I couldn't replace it.
|
| I was able to keep in touch with my drug dealers and my
| girlfriend's friends (who were also all super hot) which was very
| important to me at that age, in an environment where you really
| needed a car or people who had cars to do anything with anyone
| worth doing anything with.
|
| I got OpenSolaris booted on a Pentium II box that had 384mb of
| RAM then ran Openbox and a communications suite of SILC, IRC,
| Pidgin, Finch (a text frontend to libpurple), and some XMPP+OTR
| clients -- all in Solaris Zones to not get my shit wrecked by the
| same RCE exploits I was using against other Pidgin users (which
| seemed to be as numerous as exploits for the official AIM
| client). This was before Facebook.
|
| Solaris Zones gave me that feeling of power over software that
| Qubes enthusiasts like to talk about, similar dopamine+endorphin
| flow to being a military dictator of a 3rd world country. Shit
| was so cash.
|
| Thanks to Unix' elegance, I still had a life until moved enough
| herb to assemble another box I could run Counter Strike: Source
| (on FreeBSD, Cedega for the win) on.
| la6776 wrote:
| Thanks for letting all these nerds on HN know how important it
| was to maintain contact with a drug dealer and super hot girls
| when you were a hip teenager, I mean... i totally get it
| because I was also a really cool hip teenager. Did we just
| become best friends?
| solaris2007 wrote:
| Think of the gravity that Instagram/Facebook has today, or
| maybe things are different today, so had for millennials. Try
| to take away a young adult's phone today, you'll risk being
| eliminated. We had some neat handhelds with PCMCIA slots that
| OpenBSD ran on in those days but it was only the kids in
| "rich" neighborhoods that also had them and I was a year
| behind in getting those. The critical mass of the network
| effect at that time was on desktops and iBooks.
|
| > super hot girls
|
| Yeah a San Francisco 7 was like an 8 in Los Angeles and
| easily a 10 in most towns (in those days).
|
| They were prowling MySpace just as much as anyone else. You
| know what they're up to.
| shrubble wrote:
| I'm surprised that OpenSolaris had hardware support for random
| Pentium II boxes, but I guess if you had a supported Ethernet
| card that everything else could work...
| virajk_31 wrote:
| Yes, 200MB RAM without any non-essential apps (not really useful
| unless for a specific use case).
| scrapheap wrote:
| 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.
| _joel wrote:
| Yup, fond memories of my Amiga 500+ (full meg, woo!)
| pjmlp wrote:
| And for many scenarios people use their computers for, it
| would still be enough today.
| TheAmazingRace wrote:
| Or the Atari ST! I have one at home with 1 MB of RAM in it
| and it still flies. Boots up in less than a few seconds,
| which is faster than any of my modern PCs.
| snvzz wrote:
| Of chip RAM, too!
| dTal wrote:
| I remember, in 2007, running FreeBSD on a desktop with 512MB RAM
| and only using 64MB of it running full GNOME 2 and a running
| instance of Firefox with a couple tabs. A totally standard
| desktop experience.
|
| Even better, my laptop at the time had only 128MB of RAM and ran
| Windows XP - a supported, albeit minimal, configuration. XP was
| bloatier than FreeBSD of course, and ran correspondingly less
| well, but replacing explorer.exe with a shell called "blackbox" -
| an openbox-alike - and carefully curating applications (e.g.
| K-Meleon instead of Firefox) rendered it a perfectly viable
| multitasking desktop. I have a screenshot from that machine
| showing an AIM window, an mp3 player, an IDE for an embedded
| system, and a web browser with the documentation open for that
| IDE, all running comfortably (on one of its several desktops -
| yes you could have multiple desktops on XP with alternative
| shells such as blackbox).
|
| Computers now require approximately 30x the RAM to achieve
| similar levels of "barely viable" performance - 4GB is considered
| the absolute minimum for general purpose desktop viability. And
| qualitatively speaking, what do they do now, that my 2007 fleet
| did not do? It is difficult to say. One is led to the conclusion
| that something has gone terribly awry with resource consumption.
| alyandon wrote:
| It's the web browser and electron based apps that are the
| primary consumers of ram on my desktops with the DE and OS ram
| usage being minimal by comparison.
|
| I have an ancient laptop from 2008 with 4GB of ram that runs a
| modern KDE desktop and related applications just fine that I
| use for troubleshooting stuff. However, the moment I open a web
| browser it basically falls to pieces.
|
| I hate everything about this. :-/
| ValdikSS wrote:
| That's easy to fix: Step 1:
| sudo tee /etc/tmpfiles.d/mglru.conf <<EOF w-
| /sys/kernel/mm/lru_gen/enabled - - -
| - y w- /sys/kernel/mm/lru_gen/min_ttl_ms
| - - - - 300 EOF
| Step 2: apt install zram-tools
| sed -i 's/#PERCENT=.*/PERCENT=130/' /etc/default/zramswap
| alyandon wrote:
| I'm on an older LTS kernel so no support for lru_gen but I
| will definitely check out zramswap - thanks.
| ValdikSS wrote:
| Then also do this: echo vm.page-
| cluster=0 >> /etc/sysctl.d/85-swappiness.conf
| dTal wrote:
| 4GB still seems excessive, by at least one and probably
| several orders of magnitude, for what vanilla KDE actually
| does: browse files, manage windows, and edit text. And KDE is
| one of the best modern options.
| alyandon wrote:
| KDE doesn't need 4 GB of ram - that's just what my laptop
| happens to have which is more than ample to run the OS +
| KDE + native applications.
| whatevaa wrote:
| People are saying that 8GB for Android phone is too small.
| All of those applications are not electron either.
|
| There is bloat everywhere.
| pjmlp wrote:
| The computer I installed Slackware 2.0 was a P75 with 16 MB of
| RAM!
|
| Naturally this cannot work when every application is an
| instance of Chrome.
|
| I am glad for the RAM prices, maybe this will teach a new
| generation on how to care about their data structures again.
| overfeed wrote:
| > It is difficult to say.
|
| It isn't: you can still download the 2007-vintage FreeBSD
| desktop and run it in a VM _today_ if you 'd like. The CD
| image-files are quick downloads with modern broadband speeds.
| Prepare to be disappointed though.
| igtztorrero wrote:
| It says: that uses 217 MB RAM with Devuan, and Devuan is a fork
| of Debian13
| Fnoord wrote:
| I used to run KDE and GNOME on a computer with 256 MB RAM back
| around the year 2000. Athlon 1000 Sempron and a Duron 800 (one of
| these machines started out with 128 MB RAM). KDE 1.x, 2.x, GNOME
| 1.x, 2.x. I don't remember the very minor versions. I tried a
| myriad of Linux distributions, and FreeBSD as well. I settled for
| Debian. Back then, we (me, friends, family, etc.) thought these
| DE's were very bloated. I remember KDE 1.x very vividly because I
| had to compile it myself (or look online for binaries), and I
| digged the CDE theme. The first lightweight DE (if you discount
| fvwm) I used on Linux was XFce, but that was later on. I pretty
| much started with KDE, tried a bit of GNOME, went back to KDE (I
| came from Windows 9x). In the end, I learned to appreciate GNOME,
| and MacOSX or Mac OSX as I used to call it back then (proper name
| was Mac OS X, I suppose).
|
| My point is what you are used to is your reference point. The
| underlying OS isn't super relevant. On Linux, every distribution
| gets on par with each other eventually. On FreeBSD I used OSS and
| something like winmodem is just crap hardware. Nowadays my
| homelab and desktop have 64 GB RAM, while my MBP (M1Pro) only has
| 16 GB RAM which is the same as its successor (MBP 2015 with 16 GB
| RAM). Do I use all of that? Not really, but the main culprit is
| browser(s) (which includes apps these days). Curious if you can
| play Steam games well on FreeBSD. FreeBSD has a couple of neat
| things (tho ZFS is now better on Linux). I've always preferred PF
| to IPT.
| pmdr wrote:
| The future of computing, now that @sama is gobbling up all the
| RAM.
| js-j wrote:
| Consider the Sharp Zaurus (SL-C860, for example): - Intel Xscale
| PXA255 400 MHz - 64 MB SDRAM - Linux/QTopia desktop environment
| ruslan wrote:
| When I was watching that Lunduke's video a couple of days ago
| initially I was thinking he's just making a joke of that
| Vendefoul Wolf distro on 200MB box. I recalled using FreeBSD as
| access server with lots of modems (PPP/SLIP), Apache, Samba and
| QuakeWorld server running on a box with just 32MB of RAM. That
| was also my daily working machine with XF86 and Enlightenment
| desktop manager, circa 2000. So, 200MB is a whole lot of memory!
| lostmsu wrote:
| Just to remind people here: a single uncompressed "4k" picture is
| 33MB. Have your compositor hold 10 of them and you get 330MB just
| for the window images.
|
| Across multiple monitors my desktop is 6400x2160, which at 32
| bits comes to 55MB.
|
| Considering memory is slow and GPU compute these days is cheap
| maybe it would make sense to relayout and rerender things each
| frame directly into screen buffer instead of keeping the window
| surface buffers resident. That would require rewriting quite a
| lot of things though.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| You need window surface buffers in order to do seamless
| compositing, scaling etc. It's quite technically possible to
| achieve pixel-perfect 2D rendering with GPU-side compute, but
| in many ways it's still an open problem.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Scaling is for legacy apps, right? Modern apps should get the
| area to render and the desired pixel density.
|
| Not sure what you mean specifically by "need" in "need ... to
| do compositing". Compositing is just a way (e.g. rerender
| only on changes, cache results) of running a desktop
| environment. Strictly speaking you don't need compositing,
| you can just use immediate mode across the DE and apps.
|
| The tradeoff of course is that if an app is lagging you get a
| blank rectangle instead of a frozen picture. Well not quite 0
| or 1. You can cache lowres and/or compressed frozen picture
| periodically to improve UX.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Modern apps should get the area to render and the desired
| pixel density.
|
| What if you want to smoothly slide an app window over to a
| second monitor with a different pixel density? That's
| admittedly a very rare thing, but some people seem to be
| obsessed with it and insist that it must work. You either
| have to compose some window surface, or just use clean
| vector rendering throughout.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Windows doesn't care and neither do I. But still, this
| can be done in immediate mode if the DE can tell the app
| it wants it to render the window in multiple rectangles
| with different pixel densities.
|
| I have a hope for the whole idea, because imo it could
| significantly improve text rendering in VR by passing or
| allowing realtime access to the projection matrix along
| with the areas to render to. Regular VR compositing
| distorts text and vector graphics due to reprojection.
|
| Plus, as noted above in VRAM speed vs GPU compute speeds,
| it might actually be faster and more power efficient
| overall if done right. See e.g. the famous Windows
| Terminal optimization issue with glyph atlas caching and
| object reuse.
| whatevaa wrote:
| Need vsync. Last thing I want is screentearing desktop.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Not sure what makes you think this precludes vsync. I
| already outlined a few options on what to do if apps fail
| to produce frames at refresh rate.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-01-21 23:01 UTC)