@@vizionthing have u tried out the bubble screen saver on bubbly bubbly linux? it's so good, it's the only reason i use bubbly bubbly linux as my main distro
Because....that abomination took hold strong, that abomination went unchallenged, nobody questioned that abomination, so here we are. That abomination: Javascript.
javascript and terrible web design. javascript uses insane resources and generates even more, next to that even just the raw pagedata size of a modern webpage easily is over 50mb even for a simple webpage, then many megacorp sites are even worse. browsers already put pages to sleep and out of ram due to this, but even a few pages is already insane. essentially modern day images and video take insane amounts of storage, with videos getting over 50mb/s in some modern cases, and pictures also more regulatly going over 5mb per image these days. what is even worse however is that the mayority of public sites (not held by hobbyists or such) tend to by default either load pretty much every javascript from big companies like google, microsoft, java, adobe, amazo, etc. manually(copy pasted) or more often they copy paste a few javascripts which load all those scripts. all those webpages which have so many cookies do tend to have this, resulting in often well over 50mb just in in javascripts to track your data, even scripts which the site has no reason to have their but just is lazy so they included all of them because they don't care about you. those scripts will all use insane amounts of ram, and processing power and store all kinds of data which will also be used for things to use even more ram and such. to make it worse such data stolen with those scripts is sold to databroakers, and they sell it to criminals, terrorists, corrupt governments, companies, and advertizers and advertiser companies, these advertiser companies pay sites to show adds on their sites, when you see 20 adds on a site(is quite normal these days) in reality it loads way more adds, and all these adds use tons of resources, they aren't optimzed at all for ram or such, so you get non or poorly complressed video and images with loud sound, etc and even more scripts. when letting javascripts go on most sites this also even causes recursive loops, essentially scripts loading a script which also loads them, which eventually leads to infinite ram usage, generally browsers by default try to avoid that, but on some sites this still happens, so you can have 1TB of ram used purely by one webpage using 2 javascripts(or even one but that would be intentional probably and mallware(most of the javascripts loaded by general browsers these days when looking at count and adatasize however would be clasified as mallware when asking IT experts, it is just that malware companies pay huge amounts to make sure their scripts aren't included in mallware databases, or they even own the ones who make the lists.) that is also why using a good addblocker like ublockorigin easily reduces the ram usage per page by over 97% on average as it blocks those, also greatly reduces cpu load. also why all "gamer" browsers tend to have adblocking as well. now technically seen you should also use something like noscript in order to block even more scripts to truly get to that number, when blocking all non essential scripts you can get it reduced with that 97% less ram without losing functionality. if blocking all scripts much more. in my case however on GNU+Linux when using one of the browsers I use and/or have used I can have hunderds of pages loaded actively and it only using a few mb of ram in total, that is a browser which fully blocks all those needless elements like javascript, advertising, etc. actually it is a terminal based webbrowser, but despite how it sounds, it actually is very functional and easy to use, websites show the text you come for, you can still download images if you want to or need them, navigation through sites goes well. that said well or atleast decently made websites use almost no ram either, and can even include images. images will rapidly increase ram usage however on such sites relatively seen as a web page using only a few kb will increase ugely in relative filesize when adding a 50kb image to it. that said good sites also use good image compression meaning images which on most sites are around 1mb to 20mb take around 10kb to 500kb for visually lossless quality, even better sites often also look at if a image is needed to be in high resolution and quality or not. for example if the site is programmed to display it in 256p by 256p then it doesn't make sense to have it in 2048p by 2048p by default, most sites will litterally let you load the entire high res image and then use a script or such to display it in a lower resolution as a result you have both the high resolution one in ram and the script and the low resolution one. proper sites will do it before putting it on the server meaning way less data and such. but currently les than 0.01% of actively used sites are made properly, and among those most well made ones actually aren't used that much at all, as among the big platorms and companies generally it is near impossible to find a site which is made well or even kind of okay like.
In the early 1990s the team I worked on shared a Sun Sparcstation using a number of X terminal devices connected the main system. It had 32 MB of RAM and 1GB hard drive. 🙂
Someone launches emacs and everyone notices 😵💫 Still, I imagine a windowing system of that era to be mostly just a way to arrange xterms and run the occasional app written with motif, black and white graphics
I quite like Alpine Linux for ease of installation. If you disable crond and chronyd you can get the RAM usage at boot down to about 70 MB. Though part of me thinks that's still a lot. In 1997 you could run a full desktop (and web browser) in just 16 MB RAM under OS/2.
A part of the extra RAM nowadays come from having 64 bit. Pointers are 8 bytes now. Though I am curious where the rest goes. I think another part is also having support for cryptography. I'm not sure if you can escape it. The file system themselves also clearly are more complex (and robust) than what we had in the 90s, so surely a bit more code and RAM there. Any other ideas ?
Linux Mint with either Cinnamon or XFCE remain my top recommendations for new users; being a guy with one foot in the Windows world, I usually found KDE or LXQt desktop environments to be a bit more comfortable than GNOME. (Also, Fedora + GNOME eats about as much RAM as Windows 10) If you want to really drop the RAM usage, logging out of your full desktop and into a window manager like IceWM can free up some resources for more demanding tasks (and you can still open up your full desktop apps if necessary).
I had heard of Puppy Linux, but never paid any attention to it. I got excited when I saw your slides mentioning that it is based on JVM. That would be something different! Imagine a window manager or Wayland compositor implemented on top of JavaFX. But, alas, Puppy Linux uses JWM, which stands for Joe's Window Manager...
I think we should note GNOME uses a ram cache where it gobbles up a bunch of RAM, then gives it back to other programs like FireFox as needed. Just a note.
Well it all depend, if I open up the same amount of web browsers (60+/-) and the same amount of tabs (15+/-) open inside these, then both Linux and Windows eats about 28 GB of my 28 GB, no real big difference in performance a small win to Windows, but that is it. Linux crashes more often and is much more difficult to deal with.
Thank you for the comparison! I know tha SliTaz is one of the most lightweight desktops with about 50MB of RAM. Tested on a a weird machine with very limited RAM. Then Tiny Core came second with 60 to 80MB if I remember correctly.. But for actual modern-day usage, a full install of the major distros generally comes with a 800MB to 1.7GB of RAM usage after boot. I was a bit surprised by your results as the RAM usage was generally higher in my experience. In any case, way lower than the typical Windows 10 or 11 setup. Effect-heavy distros used to take a higher toll. For example KDE5. The new KDE6 uses less memory. Also, Mint for example comes with a lot of things bundled in, so the memory usage is greater. If you were to install Cinnamon on Arch for example, then the RAM usage would be about a third of the official version. Your typical Arch with a basic stack of drivers would take roughly 100MB to 200MB of RAM. Installing a DE or WM would raise the usage to 400+MB. Background services also add to the cold boot usage. Also, it might be worth noting that different apps shows different stats. For example, there's a difference between htop and btop. If I remember correctly, one of them ignores cached memory.
Not sure if it matters in this case, but if you have a GUI active, the resolution contributes to RAM usage. Aka higher desktop resolution - extra RAM needed. I don't remember any figures but it shouldn't be that much, but especially if going, say, 4K, it should be visible vs 1080p.
btop shows a higher overall usage than htop. Per application statistics are the same. Don't know the exact differences, but something seems to be filtered. Also the if you're using an GUI, the fancy greeter will also contribute to the total usage as it will always be running in the background.
My most budget laptop uses a 6W Pentium Silver N5030 with 4 core/threads and has 4GB of RAM, although Conky says it is only 3.65GB. My EndeavourOS Cinnamon uses 1GB (27%) to boot. I've given it 8GB of Swap, although it rarely uses any of it (none for booting). This setup is very usable. My Win10/11 ECS Liva QC710 (Snapdragon 7c), which also has only 4GB of RAM, was unusably slow, extremely anemic. Guessing the N5030 is also more powerful than the Snapdragon 7c, so perhaps an unfair comparison.
My work uses alpine in build pipelines. Each run effectively recreates the build environment from nothing in docker, which means copying 30 MB alpine vs 200 MB Centos adds up timewise. Thing is, the build server is running dozens of jobs at once so “start, run the stuff stuff, copy the build artifacts, close” cycle needs to be tight
I did a test with the three versions of Mint 21.3 installed with the needed drivers and the desktop idle, no apps open. Xfce used 1.1 GB, MATE 1.3 GB, Cinnamon 1.8 GB. The Mac laptop used 3.5 GB with Sonoma, huge overhead although it does preload whatever it thinks you might want to do next.
My mint 20.3 XFCE idles with nothing open at around 540MB's.. .. add in hexchat and some pulse effects (my audio setup is a bit strange) and it gets to the mid 600's..
Fedora is fat, but Red Hat was one of the companies that gave US$2M to the One Laptop Per Child project so that is what they used. They quickly went from 128MB in the first generation prototypes to 256MB in the production model in order to deal with this and Microsoft was able to squeeze Windows XP into this expanded memory. This caused Negroponte to say he had been wrong to say that open source would allow them to have lower cost hardware than commercial software, but he was wrong about being wrong - just use a Linux that isn't Fedora!
Our IT Department at work just upgraded everyone to Windows 11. On 9 year old workstations with 8 GB of Ram. Open Chrome and start a Zoom Call and it brings the system to 7.9 GB in use.
I am not sure you can blame the IT Department, they are just following an order "Upgrade to W11 on all HW that due to a MS survey says it can run W11", and those in top positions get the best hw first so they do not know how bad their decisions really are.
I have used dietpi OS on x86 and found it to greatly accommodate and satisfy my distro needs... Its very script oriented and menu driven on startup.. It's low key awsome!
I sometimes use Tom's Root Boot since it fits into a single floppy disk. It hasn't been updated since 2002 and is kernel 2 and command line with not much functionality, but for old machines it gets the job done. For slightly newer machines a live CD-ROM is better, and even newer a USB drive or SD card.
ram for desktops has increased a lot, I remember a few years ago in linux it was comparing 150mb to 300mb and sometimes 400 or 500mb for the heavy ones like ubuntu gnome for a desktop client with gui.
Bazzite, aurora and bluefin all of which come from silverblue/kinoite family have a download size under 8GB. But these are strictly desktop oriented immutable distributions of fedora.
interesting comparison. i love using Slackware with xfce..light and fast. browsers caches lots of contents and chrome is especially bad. does gary have a comparison on realtime os?
I created a Ventoy usb flash drive and tried a bunch of os'es to see what was best for my laptop (4g ram, 32g HD low spec). One requirement was ease of access to shared folders on the network. I was surprised to discover that some of the os'es just did not work well. Puppy was a no go. I didn't try alpine. Anyway I went with MX Linux and been working great.
Surely the init system is going to play a part in the ram usage. Which is why I like runit as if feels lighter than systemD. My favourite distro is Void Linux.
For Rocky Linux there is also a network installer called "boot iso". Why do you compare the debian network installer iso with the full blown "dvd" iso of Rocky Linux?
I tested Q4OS trinity on an old laptop with 3G ram. It was responsive and very usable, until I had to plug in a projector. I reinstalled my beloved Linuxmint and all went fine
Down load side is totally un related to the run time size as is a container memory foot print, for containers you need to include the host OS memory foot print.
Sorry, can you perhaps make a video about the difference between Containers, Virtual Machines and what you said "bare metal?" like what is difference and pros and cons of each
It would have been nice to see at least a second KDE based distro in the comparison as both gnome and XFCE get 3. I thought KDE used more resources than gnome, but that assumption could be very out of date. Otherwise great work, must have taken ages to go through so many distros for a 10 min video.
I was interested in your studies, as I want to triple boot my eeepc atom 450 2Gb ram unit. Mint xfce, batocera and tiny 11. your studies indicate that my initial thoughts would be accurate, that web browsing will make it or break it. thanks mate.
Really interesting. I switched from Debian to Arch Linux largely because it's easier to install the latest version of various packages using yay. I also started using msys2 on Windows VM's because WSL breaks due to nested virtualization. msys2 also uses pacman. Alpine does look interesting for containers--I haven't heard of it.
23 years ago I used to run Smoothwall linux on 32 MEGABYTES of RAM on a 100 megahertz Pentium - small office firewall and modem manager - ran for 200 days without a reboot …
I don’t understand the thought process of keyboard warriors thinking that by insulting your choices, their opinions will matter. When I first came to open-source via Ubuntu 12.04, it was very distracting to be treated to word-vomit about the supposed inferiority of Unity desktop or the perils of software blobs when I was trying to get a working wifi. Fireship’s YT channel put out a video dropping the line, “I use FreeBSD, BTW”. I need that on the back of a shirt with a Beastie logo and “GNU-Free” on the front. Which is true of my servers and one workstation. :P
@@GaryExplains It's not a problem to run glibc code on the musl system - there are guides on how to do this. PostmarketOS (based on Alpine) is making progress to switch to systemd - it's easier to deal with certain behaviors. You can check their blog as to why they are making that move. GNU or not, Alpine is awesome. Sticking with FOSS software eliminates pretty much all friction. If you need proprietary code - chances are glibc dependency may crop up.
@@GaryExplains the use a musl caused a lot of problems with older versions of Java like Java 8, for example, to use Apline you had to install Glibc inside the Alpine container, it was far from clean, thankfully it's a thing of the past. My company is a big Java shop and when we evaluated Alpine at the time, it was significantly slower at memory allocation with Java. I wouldn't know the situation now as we haven't reviewed it since.
No. It is just that I asked specifically in the video to not post comments about distros I didn't test (other than to recommend them, which is what I asked at the end of the video).
Funny, I never worried about the amount of RAM needed. If the desktops I build would run MS Windows, then they would run just about any Linux distribution. Thanks for a very informative posting.
Well... I learned early on that when it comes to Linux, "Free" RAM is a BAD thing. Linux caches a LOT of stuff in RAM. So if you're just looking at how much free RAM you have, you might not be looking at it the right way. I mean, looking at htop right now, my system shows 10-15% of my RAM in use. Half of that is cached data. Of course, my system has a ridiculous amount of RAM (256GB), so there's that. But I run Gentoo. There's no telling how much my RAM usage could spike when compiling. At this point, yes, I have TOO MUCH RAM, but having so much RAM just means I have no need for a swap partition.
@@GaryExplains I know. But there was a time I didn't realize this. A time when I pulled up a gui memory monitor and saw only a tiny sliver of RAM "free" and thought that was a bad thing. It had to be explained to me, and I suspect it would have to be explained to many new users as well...
Thank you for this. I just upgraded linux mint (xfce) to 22 and im definitely seeing the toll on my old laptop versus version 20 (xfce). Im not too sure whats up.. might give lubuntu a try.
Interesting. Here's some random mentions: - I support Gary in not testing Fedora. Other than the ethical reasons, I'm still baffled that people recommend it to new users, which might be a setup for later frustrations when upgrading to a new Fedora could break important workflows for an user. Or the update to not work. Fedora is too happy to embrace new stuff and ditch working "old" stuff to be a safe option for someone who is not aware and ok with this approach. - a bit weird that there were 3 tests on XFCE and only one on KDE. And also 3 on GNOME. By popularity, usage, features, it should be more like 3 GNOME, 3 KDE and 2 XFCE. Or at the very least one more KDE instead of a 3rd XFCE - a bit out of scope for this video, but it's important to know that different distros and desktop environments (and flavours/spins/profiles) come with different things supported, availabile and installed. Hence the different RAM usage. You might find yourself that if you take one of the ligher distro and add the things you want on top, you might end up using more RAM than another distro that maybe had those things you wanted already installed and possibly optmized. Or missing something else that you don't need and recoup some RAM and disk space there. In truth, if you know what you want and configure everything as you want and need, you'll probably reach the same RAM usage on all distros, as you'll effectively eliminate the differences. So, if you care about how much RAM you use (like maybe you have an old laptop and it only has 4 GB of RAM), then after picking a distro (which you shouldn't spend too much time on) you should learn what you have installed and what you use out of it, and what you actually need, so you can know what to remove/uninstall or change. - a minor thing, but having a higher desktop resolution (when using any GUI) adds up a bit on RAM usage. Don't have exact figures, but it should be pretty minimal, like several MB to a couple hundred MBs - if anyone is happening to read this, I would like to mention one distro that allows you somewhat easily to control what you use and to tune to quite a high degree the kernel and all the apps you install on your system: Gentoo. The thing with Gentoo is that the norm is to compile every app you install (though you have precompiled options too, especially for the big apps like browsers which can take a lot to compile). Now, you can compile an app on any distro, but Gentoo streamlines it. And also allows to further customize by a thing called "USE flags". With these you basically give compiler options. And with these you can compile exactly for your system. And exactly what you need and want out of it (well, as much as the use flags allow, which is dependent on who made the package in that repo). And Gentoo allows for more advanced things, like LTO (link time optimization). For example you can have the app compiled exactly for your new processor, without the need to have it supported to work on a Core 2 Duo, so you can use more advanced CPU instructions. You can have it compiled specifically just for X or just for Wayland, not both, since you only use X or only use Wayland. Lastly, you can, say compile without bluetooth support, since your desktop doesn't have bluetooth. The same for the kernel. Now, to be fair, using another kernel, or compiling it yourself is not exactly something unique with Gentoo. It just happens more statistically, since people using Gentoo are already in the customizing mentality. There's a lot of things you can not use, as compared to a generic kernel, if you tune it to your system (so you can remove a lot of drivers that you won't use since you simply don't have those devices). Are you only using XFS and nothing with ext4, btrfs, bcachefs and all that jazz ? Well, you can only have xfs in your kernel. And so on. Having a smaller kernel impacts how much RAM it needs. It can also very slightly boost your boot speed, if it's smaller.
"Some use Gnome...." pronounced 'nome.' In the Linux sphere whenever I see a something with a name beginning with 'gn' I pronounce it with a hard 'g.' "Guh-nome"
I haven't tried it. At the end of the day the Pi Zero 2 W is a $15 SBC with only 512MB of memory. It isn't really designed for desktop usage. A web browser like Firefox or Chrome uses more than 512MB just to show a blank page. Whatever OS you pick it can't perform miracles. You might want to watch my video on ZRAM that can be very useful on a Zero 2 W.
One thing to think about when it comes to older systems is if you really should be using 64bit instead of 32bit. 32bit is using less memory, but it becomes rare as many distros are not available in 32bit. With limited resources, you want the system to be using as little as possible. Would be nice to watch a movie on the subject of how to get the most out of a 1 to 4 gb system. Like zram, alternative to ssh and shell.
Surprisingly both the 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Alpine Linux use about the same amount of RAM, at least in my experience.
2 месяца назад
@zoomosis but then we must take all applications we want to run as well. I think it was on the youtube channel 'explaining computers' who have made a comparison between 32 and 64 bit.
@@bertblankenstein3738 Well, not just "technically". It is not Linux. Say that to BSD users, and you'll offend them harder than if you directly insult their parents.
Good on you for skipping Fedora! Red Hat's treatment of CentOS was far from community centered! I was never a big fan of RH either. SuSE 4 life 😂 And yes, I really do love SuSE! I'm not sure it's super lightweight, but I have had great luck using it as a desktop system, and their KDE support has always been top notch. Sorry for being off topic slightly 😂
I support his decision too. I'm also still baffled that people recommend Fedora to new users. Fedora, while being quite polished and overall a big contributor to moving things forward, I think it's terrible for a new user because they're so happy to adopt new stuff and remove old stuff, even if the old one was working fine. Even if it breaks workflows. That means that people might find themselves not being able to upgrade without having things break. Or upgrading and having things break.
How can you call OpenIndiana an Enterprise System, when you know that "OpenIndiana is a distribution developed and maintained by a community of volunteers." Volunteers != Enterprise.
Windows compared to Android is same as fluorescent light bulb compared to incandescent one. Linux (with GUI) is a LED then. Seriously, why does phone system need to use 6 to 8 GB of RAM on idle ? And each openex app near 200-500 MB minimum ? I thought it was supposed to be efficient.
@@GaryExplains those were all rhetorical questions. Android has the worst RAM allocation model and overhead in the world, and I just don't get, why Google doesn't focus on performance and efficiency in comparatively"weak" mobile devices. We need UEFI and consequently easily installed Linux in our phones, not yet another virtualization layer and usage limitations (bye side loading ?).
Next head over to the Internet Archive and grab yourself a copy of a mid-90s Debian, RH, Slackware, SuSE, Mandrake, ... CD ISO, the file size will be a few hundred MB, the kernel will require less than 4MB of RAM, X will start if you have 8MB of RAM, with about the same in swap space. Then play spot the difference between the cmd line tools, and Xeyes, XPilot, xv, ... versions available in the mid 90s, and required a hundredth of the resources of their present iterations.
@@GaryExplains You could have a play to see how much you could shrink the memory footprint, of a current distribution, if you were to recompile the kernel without USB-4, WiFi, bluetooth, webcam, touch input, asymmetric CPU type support, anything more than SVGA graphics, ... , and compare to the memory foot print of a mid-90s distribution, that only offered kernel modules for your wired NE2000 NIC, S3 graphics, Soundblaster, PS2 mouse and keyboard, if you were lucky.
@AndrewRoberts11 While that could be fun, I don't think the amount of effort it would require vs the number of people who would watch that video, would mean it would be worthwhile!
@@GaryExplains Many enterprises run custom kernels, if not full stacks, with the ~35 years of kernel module bloat pruned (there was that a.out to ELF reworking of the Kernel around 94). Have a play at recompiling the kernel with all the unused filesystems dropped, unused hardware modules dropped, ... , of your chosen VM. You should end up with a smaller kernel, that's also quicker to compile.
@@AndrewRoberts11 I would love to see things like that, especially since I'm curious what's taking up the extra space. But Gary has a diverse range of topics, he doesn't have the time to do deep dives like that.
Interesting Gary, you didn't include Bubbly Linux in your tests... instant thumbs down.... and I'm unsubscribing.... forever! Thus concludes my impersonation of a typical Linux forum power user.
@@marioprawirosudiro7301 In the context of laptops, we're usually talking about desktop OS, and then other stuff starts to limit you. MacOS is a great example - it does use significant memory, but the rest of the OS is very optimized, so it runs very smooth. Or for Linux DEs, being GPU-accelerated makes a big difference in how smooth the GUI will operate. This was even an issue on Windows 7 - using the classic interface over Aero would, despite the simplistic look, make the GUI significantly slower, because without the DWM, stuff would need constant redraws.
@@graealex Yes, desktop OS. On a machine with 8 gigs _soldered-on_ memory (lots of modern laptops, especially those based on Ryzen 7xxx series). Of which around 2 gigs or so would be allocated for VRAM - meaning we only have around 6 gigs to play around with. If the distro itself takes 2 gigs on fresh boot, that's 4 gigs left. At this point, let's hope the user doesn't open too many tabs while browsing... GPU acceleration would not be the bottleneck here. It's the constant back and forth swapping due to lack of memory.
lost me as soon as you have to go on your junk about Fedora... its as bad as people who have to insert politics into everything, and shows a lot of bias... which means I know I'll get a bad "explanation" when you already show me your biases influence what you do.
You seem confused. To have an opinion isn't bias. You also have an opinion, in that you (I guess) support Fedora or at least don't care. Using your definition of the word 'bias' shows that you are likewise biased. Everyone's 'biases' influence what they do. I thought that was obvious.
@@GaryExplains What I was expecting from the title and previous videos I've seen was more of a informational on the topic in general without opinion/bias influencing the data, maybe just the conclusions. Leaving out something that is extremely common because you don't like what some company, who is very loosely related, influences the validity of the data to me... it puts a wonder in the back of my mind of what else is influenced that you didn't mention. Its fine if that's how you want to do things, I am not saying its right or wrong, and I appreciate you honestly saying at the start why you didn't include it... you realized it was common enough that it should have been included, but you didn't want to. It just lets me know more about the channel and what information I get from you.
@AyaWetts As I said, you seem confused and your reply has done nothing but confirm that. The decision to leave Fedora out doesn't alter the data. I don't appreciate you saying that it does, and slandering me. As you said, I have been upfront and honest. If you think that leaving out Fedora "influences the validity of the data" then I can't help you. Sorry. I think you should do some research about the relationship between Red Hat and Fedora, they aren't "very loosely related", the fact that you think they are tells me enough about your knowledge of Linux.
why didn't you cover bubbly bubbly linux distro?
😂
Best in all categories, so there was no need to show it.
The problem with BBL is that its got far too much junk in the trunk.
@@vizionthing have u tried out the bubble screen saver on bubbly bubbly linux? it's so good, it's the only reason i use bubbly bubbly linux as my main distro
1:10
i ask myself why browsers use so much ram to render a page.
Because....that abomination took hold strong, that abomination went unchallenged, nobody questioned that abomination, so here we are.
That abomination: Javascript.
javascript and terrible web design.
javascript uses insane resources and generates even more, next to that even just the raw pagedata size of a modern webpage easily is over 50mb even for a simple webpage, then many megacorp sites are even worse.
browsers already put pages to sleep and out of ram due to this, but even a few pages is already insane.
essentially modern day images and video take insane amounts of storage, with videos getting over 50mb/s in some modern cases, and pictures also more regulatly going over 5mb per image these days.
what is even worse however is that the mayority of public sites (not held by hobbyists or such) tend to by default either load pretty much every javascript from big companies like google, microsoft, java, adobe, amazo, etc. manually(copy pasted) or more often they copy paste a few javascripts which load all those scripts. all those webpages which have so many cookies do tend to have this, resulting in often well over 50mb just in in javascripts to track your data, even scripts which the site has no reason to have their but just is lazy so they included all of them because they don't care about you.
those scripts will all use insane amounts of ram, and processing power and store all kinds of data which will also be used for things to use even more ram and such.
to make it worse such data stolen with those scripts is sold to databroakers, and they sell it to criminals, terrorists, corrupt governments, companies, and advertizers and advertiser companies, these advertiser companies pay sites to show adds on their sites, when you see 20 adds on a site(is quite normal these days) in reality it loads way more adds, and all these adds use tons of resources, they aren't optimzed at all for ram or such, so you get non or poorly complressed video and images with loud sound, etc and even more scripts. when letting javascripts go on most sites this also even causes recursive loops, essentially scripts loading a script which also loads them, which eventually leads to infinite ram usage, generally browsers by default try to avoid that, but on some sites this still happens, so you can have 1TB of ram used purely by one webpage using 2 javascripts(or even one but that would be intentional probably and mallware(most of the javascripts loaded by general browsers these days when looking at count and adatasize however would be clasified as mallware when asking IT experts, it is just that malware companies pay huge amounts to make sure their scripts aren't included in mallware databases, or they even own the ones who make the lists.)
that is also why using a good addblocker like ublockorigin easily reduces the ram usage per page by over 97% on average as it blocks those, also greatly reduces cpu load. also why all "gamer" browsers tend to have adblocking as well.
now technically seen you should also use something like noscript in order to block even more scripts to truly get to that number, when blocking all non essential scripts you can get it reduced with that 97% less ram without losing functionality.
if blocking all scripts much more.
in my case however on GNU+Linux when using one of the browsers I use and/or have used I can have hunderds of pages loaded actively and it only using a few mb of ram in total, that is a browser which fully blocks all those needless elements like javascript, advertising, etc. actually it is a terminal based webbrowser, but despite how it sounds, it actually is very functional and easy to use, websites show the text you come for, you can still download images if you want to or need them, navigation through sites goes well.
that said well or atleast decently made websites use almost no ram either, and can even include images.
images will rapidly increase ram usage however on such sites relatively seen as a web page using only a few kb will increase ugely in relative filesize when adding a 50kb image to it.
that said good sites also use good image compression meaning images which on most sites are around 1mb to 20mb take around 10kb to 500kb for visually lossless quality, even better sites often also look at if a image is needed to be in high resolution and quality or not. for example if the site is programmed to display it in 256p by 256p then it doesn't make sense to have it in 2048p by 2048p by default, most sites will litterally let you load the entire high res image and then use a script or such to display it in a lower resolution as a result you have both the high resolution one in ram and the script and the low resolution one.
proper sites will do it before putting it on the server meaning way less data and such.
but currently les than 0.01% of actively used sites are made properly, and among those most well made ones actually aren't used that much at all, as among the big platorms and companies generally it is near impossible to find a site which is made well or even kind of okay like.
In the early 1990s the team I worked on shared a Sun Sparcstation using a number of X terminal devices connected the main system. It had 32 MB of RAM and 1GB hard drive. 🙂
Someone launches emacs and everyone notices 😵💫
Still, I imagine a windowing system of that era to be mostly just a way to arrange xterms and run the occasional app written with motif, black and white graphics
@@johnsimon8457 I was using emacs. We were writing an IDE for parallel computing
I had Windows 3.1 on a 80286 with a 20MB hard Drive
@@UmVtCg likewise ... don't remember if it had 2MB or 4MB of RAM
I quite like Alpine Linux for ease of installation. If you disable crond and chronyd you can get the RAM usage at boot down to about 70 MB.
Though part of me thinks that's still a lot. In 1997 you could run a full desktop (and web browser) in just 16 MB RAM under OS/2.
Considering you can get a RPI Zero 2 with 512MBs for 20 euros I think we'll be OK 😂
A part of the extra RAM nowadays come from having 64 bit. Pointers are 8 bytes now.
Though I am curious where the rest goes. I think another part is also having support for cryptography. I'm not sure if you can escape it. The file system themselves also clearly are more complex (and robust) than what we had in the 90s, so surely a bit more code and RAM there. Any other ideas ?
Linux Mint with either Cinnamon or XFCE remain my top recommendations for new users; being a guy with one foot in the Windows world, I usually found KDE or LXQt desktop environments to be a bit more comfortable than GNOME. (Also, Fedora + GNOME eats about as much RAM as Windows 10)
If you want to really drop the RAM usage, logging out of your full desktop and into a window manager like IceWM can free up some resources for more demanding tasks (and you can still open up your full desktop apps if necessary).
XFCE is a great desktop for a middleweight experience. There are a ton of pre-configured themes available by the community.
I had heard of Puppy Linux, but never paid any attention to it. I got excited when I saw your slides mentioning that it is based on JVM. That would be something different! Imagine a window manager or Wayland compositor implemented on top of JavaFX. But, alas, Puppy Linux uses JWM, which stands for Joe's Window Manager...
Whaaaaaat????? No Arch?????
Foamin at mouth ensues
BASED take on Fedora ❤
I think we should note GNOME uses a ram cache where it gobbles up a bunch of RAM, then gives it back to other programs like FireFox as needed. Just a note.
Looks like I would not have needed 32 GB of RAM - guess I simply wanted 32 GB of RAM
I know that feeling! 😁
Well it all depend, if I open up the same amount of web browsers (60+/-) and the same amount of tabs (15+/-) open inside these, then both Linux and Windows eats about 28 GB of my 28 GB, no real big difference in performance a small win to Windows, but that is it. Linux crashes more often and is much more difficult to deal with.
Thank you for the comparison!
I know tha SliTaz is one of the most lightweight desktops with about 50MB of RAM. Tested on a a weird machine with very limited RAM. Then Tiny Core came second with 60 to 80MB if I remember correctly..
But for actual modern-day usage, a full install of the major distros generally comes with a 800MB to 1.7GB of RAM usage after boot. I was a bit surprised by your results as the RAM usage was generally higher in my experience. In any case, way lower than the typical Windows 10 or 11 setup.
Effect-heavy distros used to take a higher toll. For example KDE5. The new KDE6 uses less memory. Also, Mint for example comes with a lot of things bundled in, so the memory usage is greater. If you were to install Cinnamon on Arch for example, then the RAM usage would be about a third of the official version.
Your typical Arch with a basic stack of drivers would take roughly 100MB to 200MB of RAM. Installing a DE or WM would raise the usage to 400+MB. Background services also add to the cold boot usage.
Also, it might be worth noting that different apps shows different stats. For example, there's a difference between htop and btop. If I remember correctly, one of them ignores cached memory.
Both htop and btop shows cached ram on my devuan stable (out of the box apps)
Not sure if it matters in this case, but if you have a GUI active, the resolution contributes to RAM usage. Aka higher desktop resolution - extra RAM needed. I don't remember any figures but it shouldn't be that much, but especially if going, say, 4K, it should be visible vs 1080p.
btop shows a higher overall usage than htop. Per application statistics are the same. Don't know the exact differences, but something seems to be filtered.
Also the if you're using an GUI, the fancy greeter will also contribute to the total usage as it will always be running in the background.
My most budget laptop uses a 6W Pentium Silver N5030 with 4 core/threads and has 4GB of RAM, although Conky says it is only 3.65GB. My EndeavourOS Cinnamon uses 1GB (27%) to boot. I've given it 8GB of Swap, although it rarely uses any of it (none for booting). This setup is very usable. My Win10/11 ECS Liva QC710 (Snapdragon 7c), which also has only 4GB of RAM, was unusably slow, extremely anemic. Guessing the N5030 is also more powerful than the Snapdragon 7c, so perhaps an unfair comparison.
My work uses alpine in build pipelines. Each run effectively recreates the build environment from nothing in docker, which means copying 30 MB alpine vs 200 MB Centos adds up timewise.
Thing is, the build server is running dozens of jobs at once so “start, run the stuff stuff, copy the build artifacts, close” cycle needs to be tight
I did a test with the three versions of Mint 21.3 installed with the needed drivers and the desktop idle, no apps open. Xfce used 1.1 GB, MATE 1.3 GB, Cinnamon 1.8 GB. The Mac laptop used 3.5 GB with Sonoma, huge overhead although it does preload whatever it thinks you might want to do next.
My mint 20.3 XFCE idles with nothing open at around 540MB's.. .. add in hexchat and some pulse effects (my audio setup is a bit strange) and it gets to the mid 600's..
God bless you. I love your stance on Fedora.
Fedora is fat, but Red Hat was one of the companies that gave US$2M to the One Laptop Per Child project so that is what they used. They quickly went from 128MB in the first generation prototypes to 256MB in the production model in order to deal with this and Microsoft was able to squeeze Windows XP into this expanded memory. This caused Negroponte to say he had been wrong to say that open source would allow them to have lower cost hardware than commercial software, but he was wrong about being wrong - just use a Linux that isn't Fedora!
Our IT Department at work just upgraded everyone to Windows 11. On 9 year old workstations with 8 GB of Ram. Open Chrome and start a Zoom Call and it brings the system to 7.9 GB in use.
I am not sure you can blame the IT Department, they are just following an order "Upgrade to W11 on all HW that due to a MS survey says it can run W11", and those in top positions get the best hw first so they do not know how bad their decisions really are.
I have used dietpi OS on x86 and found it to greatly accommodate and satisfy my distro needs... Its very script oriented and menu driven on startup.. It's low key awsome!
Alpine 🥳 Up next, the BSDs?!
I sometimes use Tom's Root Boot since it fits into a single floppy disk. It hasn't been updated since 2002 and is kernel 2 and command line with not much functionality, but for old machines it gets the job done. For slightly newer machines a live CD-ROM is better, and even newer a USB drive or SD card.
Very useful. Can you also do this analysis for automotive OS’?
ram for desktops has increased a lot, I remember a few years ago in linux it was comparing 150mb to 300mb and sometimes 400 or 500mb for the heavy ones like ubuntu gnome for a desktop client with gui.
Best fat shaming I've see all year - cheers Gary
Bazzite, aurora and bluefin all of which come from silverblue/kinoite family have a download size under 8GB.
But these are strictly desktop oriented immutable distributions of fedora.
interesting comparison. i love using Slackware with xfce..light and fast. browsers caches lots of contents and chrome is especially bad. does gary have a comparison on realtime os?
Might be interesting to see how RAM hungry a Cosmic desktop distro is as it matures...
I created a Ventoy usb flash drive and tried a bunch of os'es to see what was best for my laptop (4g ram, 32g HD low spec). One requirement was ease of access to shared folders on the network. I was surprised to discover that some of the os'es just did not work well. Puppy was a no go. I didn't try alpine. Anyway I went with MX Linux and been working great.
Surely the init system is going to play a part in the ram usage. Which is why I like runit as if feels lighter than systemD.
My favourite distro is Void Linux.
For Rocky Linux there is also a network installer called "boot iso". Why do you compare the debian network installer iso with the full blown "dvd" iso of Rocky Linux?
😂
I tested Q4OS trinity on an old laptop with 3G ram. It was responsive and very usable, until I had to plug in a projector. I reinstalled my beloved Linuxmint and all went fine
Down load side is totally un related to the run time size as is a container memory foot print, for containers you need to include the host OS memory foot print.
Did I imply anywhere that download size is related to memory size?
I like fedora and zorin os
Sorry, can you perhaps make a video about the difference between Containers, Virtual Machines and what you said "bare metal?" like what is difference and pros and cons of each
Why didn't you include window managers like i3wm?
😂 Brilliant.
Some say that unused memory is wasted memory.
For this kinda test would would check memory without counting cache.
It would have been nice to see at least a second KDE based distro in the comparison as both gnome and XFCE get 3. I thought KDE used more resources than gnome, but that assumption could be very out of date. Otherwise great work, must have taken ages to go through so many distros for a 10 min video.
I was interested in your studies, as I want to triple boot my eeepc atom 450 2Gb ram unit. Mint xfce, batocera and tiny 11. your studies indicate that my initial thoughts would be accurate, that web browsing will make it or break it. thanks mate.
This Linux comparison is most interest and informative.
the most "elastic" Linux is not bubbly bubbly, but close...it's "double bubble"!
sorry...
tinycore by default also loads the entire os into ram so around 20 of those 60 mb of ram where the os. if I remember correctly.
Really interesting. I switched from Debian to Arch Linux largely because it's easier to install the latest version of various packages using yay. I also started using msys2 on Windows VM's because WSL breaks due to nested virtualization. msys2 also uses pacman. Alpine does look interesting for containers--I haven't heard of it.
23 years ago I used to run Smoothwall linux on 32 MEGABYTES of RAM on a 100 megahertz Pentium - small office firewall and modem manager - ran for 200 days without a reboot …
What do you meant with "Containers"?
Try here for starters en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containerization_(computing) and then try linuxcontainers.org/
I don’t understand the thought process of keyboard warriors thinking that by insulting your choices, their opinions will matter.
When I first came to open-source via Ubuntu 12.04, it was very distracting to be treated to word-vomit about the supposed inferiority of Unity desktop or the perils of software blobs when I was trying to get a working wifi.
Fireship’s YT channel put out a video dropping the line, “I use FreeBSD, BTW”. I need that on the back of a shirt with a Beastie logo and “GNU-Free” on the front. Which is true of my servers and one workstation. :P
Alpine isn't GNU, so perhaps that influences the lower RAM use, but also might affect compatibility.
Indeed, it doesn't use GNU, which is why it is so important. Are you aware of any compatibility problems or are you just mud slinging?
@@GaryExplains I've no idea about the compatibility level, and hoping someone will investigate and explain how good or bad the compatibility is.
@@GaryExplains It's not a problem to run glibc code on the musl system - there are guides on how to do this.
PostmarketOS (based on Alpine) is making progress to switch to systemd - it's easier to deal with certain behaviors. You can check their blog as to why they are making that move.
GNU or not, Alpine is awesome. Sticking with FOSS software eliminates pretty much all friction. If you need proprietary code - chances are glibc dependency may crop up.
@@martineyles Alpine uses busybox instead of gnu and musl libc instead of glibc. However, as far as I know, the gnu tools can be installed.
@@GaryExplains the use a musl caused a lot of problems with older versions of Java like Java 8, for example, to use Apline you had to install Glibc inside the Alpine container, it was far from clean, thankfully it's a thing of the past. My company is a big Java shop and when we evaluated Alpine at the time, it was significantly slower at memory allocation with Java. I wouldn't know the situation now as we haven't reviewed it since.
Tried Clearlinux by intel?
😂
@@GaryExplains didn't heard of it right😂
No. It is just that I asked specifically in the video to not post comments about distros I didn't test (other than to recommend them, which is what I asked at the end of the video).
@@GaryExplainsoh missed that 😂
Funny, I never worried about the amount of RAM needed. If the desktops I build would run MS Windows, then they would run just about any Linux distribution. Thanks for a very informative posting.
You've compared Debian with a few others here, but not with the installed commandline-only version, which is the one I mostly use. Why is this?
😂
@@GaryExplains That's not a constructive answer…
It is when you consider what I said in the video already.
Well... I learned early on that when it comes to Linux, "Free" RAM is a BAD thing. Linux caches a LOT of stuff in RAM. So if you're just looking at how much free RAM you have, you might not be looking at it the right way. I mean, looking at htop right now, my system shows 10-15% of my RAM in use. Half of that is cached data. Of course, my system has a ridiculous amount of RAM (256GB), so there's that. But I run Gentoo. There's no telling how much my RAM usage could spike when compiling. At this point, yes, I have TOO MUCH RAM, but having so much RAM just means I have no need for a swap partition.
I was looking at the right number, this isn't my first rodeo.
@@GaryExplains I know. But there was a time I didn't realize this. A time when I pulled up a gui memory monitor and saw only a tiny sliver of RAM "free" and thought that was a bad thing. It had to be explained to me, and I suspect it would have to be explained to many new users as well...
Thank you for this. I just upgraded linux mint (xfce) to 22 and im definitely seeing the toll on my old laptop versus version 20 (xfce). Im not too sure whats up.. might give lubuntu a try.
Interesting. Here's some random mentions:
- I support Gary in not testing Fedora. Other than the ethical reasons, I'm still baffled that people recommend it to new users, which might be a setup for later frustrations when upgrading to a new Fedora could break important workflows for an user. Or the update to not work. Fedora is too happy to embrace new stuff and ditch working "old" stuff to be a safe option for someone who is not aware and ok with this approach.
- a bit weird that there were 3 tests on XFCE and only one on KDE. And also 3 on GNOME. By popularity, usage, features, it should be more like 3 GNOME, 3 KDE and 2 XFCE. Or at the very least one more KDE instead of a 3rd XFCE
- a bit out of scope for this video, but it's important to know that different distros and desktop environments (and flavours/spins/profiles) come with different things supported, availabile and installed. Hence the different RAM usage. You might find yourself that if you take one of the ligher distro and add the things you want on top, you might end up using more RAM than another distro that maybe had those things you wanted already installed and possibly optmized. Or missing something else that you don't need and recoup some RAM and disk space there.
In truth, if you know what you want and configure everything as you want and need, you'll probably reach the same RAM usage on all distros, as you'll effectively eliminate the differences.
So, if you care about how much RAM you use (like maybe you have an old laptop and it only has 4 GB of RAM), then after picking a distro (which you shouldn't spend too much time on) you should learn what you have installed and what you use out of it, and what you actually need, so you can know what to remove/uninstall or change.
- a minor thing, but having a higher desktop resolution (when using any GUI) adds up a bit on RAM usage. Don't have exact figures, but it should be pretty minimal, like several MB to a couple hundred MBs
- if anyone is happening to read this, I would like to mention one distro that allows you somewhat easily to control what you use and to tune to quite a high degree the kernel and all the apps you install on your system: Gentoo. The thing with Gentoo is that the norm is to compile every app you install (though you have precompiled options too, especially for the big apps like browsers which can take a lot to compile).
Now, you can compile an app on any distro, but Gentoo streamlines it. And also allows to further customize by a thing called "USE flags". With these you basically give compiler options. And with these you can compile exactly for your system. And exactly what you need and want out of it (well, as much as the use flags allow, which is dependent on who made the package in that repo). And Gentoo allows for more advanced things, like LTO (link time optimization).
For example you can have the app compiled exactly for your new processor, without the need to have it supported to work on a Core 2 Duo, so you can use more advanced CPU instructions.
You can have it compiled specifically just for X or just for Wayland, not both, since you only use X or only use Wayland. Lastly, you can, say compile without bluetooth support, since your desktop doesn't have bluetooth.
The same for the kernel. Now, to be fair, using another kernel, or compiling it yourself is not exactly something unique with Gentoo. It just happens more statistically, since people using Gentoo are already in the customizing mentality. There's a lot of things you can not use, as compared to a generic kernel, if you tune it to your system (so you can remove a lot of drivers that you won't use since you simply don't have those devices). Are you only using XFS and nothing with ext4, btrfs, bcachefs and all that jazz ? Well, you can only have xfs in your kernel. And so on. Having a smaller kernel impacts how much RAM it needs. It can also very slightly boost your boot speed, if it's smaller.
"Some use Gnome...." pronounced 'nome.'
In the Linux sphere whenever I see a something with a name beginning with 'gn' I pronounce it with a hard 'g.'
"Guh-nome"
Sir, best os for raspberry pi zero 2w?
Raspberry Pi OS
@@GaryExplains doesn't work well especially browsers, any other suggestions sir?
It isn't the OS that it is at fault. Browsers are very resource hungry. Try a different browser, not a different OS.
@@GaryExplains Ok, thankyou, have you tried diet pi os and what are your views on that
I haven't tried it. At the end of the day the Pi Zero 2 W is a $15 SBC with only 512MB of memory. It isn't really designed for desktop usage. A web browser like Firefox or Chrome uses more than 512MB just to show a blank page. Whatever OS you pick it can't perform miracles. You might want to watch my video on ZRAM that can be very useful on a Zero 2 W.
So much for: "I use Debian because Ubuntu is bloated." 7:27
What about TempleOS?
😂
TempleOS is so divine, you don't need to concern yourself with RAM usage. Just having a 64bit processor.
Is there a Linux version suitable for a gaming lounge or classroom?
Nobara is good for gaming and tweaked for it. POP!_OS is another but not that familiar with it.
Another vote for pop Os it's great for Nvidia compatibly... Though bazite seems to be the go to for a lot now. But that's arch Vs Debian really
Ubuntu 24.04.1 is a resource hog
One thing to think about when it comes to older systems is if you really should be using 64bit instead of 32bit. 32bit is using less memory, but it becomes rare as many distros are not available in 32bit. With limited resources, you want the system to be using as little as possible.
Would be nice to watch a movie on the subject of how to get the most out of a 1 to 4 gb system. Like zram, alternative to ssh and shell.
I have a video on zram if that is of any use to you: ruclips.net/video/RLIAX6L5O5w/видео.html
Surprisingly both the 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Alpine Linux use about the same amount of RAM, at least in my experience.
@zoomosis but then we must take all applications we want to run as well. I think it was on the youtube channel 'explaining computers' who have made a comparison between 32 and 64 bit.
No Arch? Tux is not amused. :)
😂
OpenBSD 7.5 upon booting to the TWM desktop uses 74 Megabytes.
I suppose BSD is technically not linux, but good to know.
@@bertblankenstein3738 Well, not just "technically". It is not Linux.
Say that to BSD users, and you'll offend them harder than if you directly insult their parents.
Good on you for skipping Fedora! Red Hat's treatment of CentOS was far from community centered! I was never a big fan of RH either. SuSE 4 life 😂 And yes, I really do love SuSE! I'm not sure it's super lightweight, but I have had great luck using it as a desktop system, and their KDE support has always been top notch. Sorry for being off topic slightly 😂
I support his decision too.
I'm also still baffled that people recommend Fedora to new users. Fedora, while being quite polished and overall a big contributor to moving things forward, I think it's terrible for a new user because they're so happy to adopt new stuff and remove old stuff, even if the old one was working fine. Even if it breaks workflows. That means that people might find themselves not being able to upgrade without having things break. Or upgrading and having things break.
Just use an enterprise system like openindiana
How can you call OpenIndiana an Enterprise System, when you know that "OpenIndiana is a distribution developed and maintained by a community of volunteers." Volunteers != Enterprise.
if you want light then ToyBox Linux is pretty good.
My prefered distro is ANTIX
Windows compared to Android is same as fluorescent light bulb compared to incandescent one. Linux (with GUI) is a LED then.
Seriously, why does phone system need to use 6 to 8 GB of RAM on idle ? And each openex app near 200-500 MB minimum ? I thought it was supposed to be efficient.
I have several videos about Android RAM usage, they might help answer your question.
@@GaryExplains those were all rhetorical questions.
Android has the worst RAM allocation model and overhead in the world, and I just don't get, why Google doesn't focus on performance and efficiency in comparatively"weak" mobile devices.
We need UEFI and consequently easily installed Linux in our phones, not yet another virtualization layer and usage limitations (bye side loading ?).
As I said, those videos will help. It has nothing to do with Linux.
Was the thumbnail generated with AI?
Compare them to Windoze …
Gary... JWM 😉
Love your take on Fedora!
You couldn't be more correct!
Glad you think so! 👍
Pure linux (aka only the kernel)
Microsoft Linux 3.0. Of course, no desktop available in the repo.
edit: Oh, you are probably calling it "Azure Linux" 👍
He even had a video about it a few days ago.
DietPI with docker installed: 340 Mb. Nice.
Next head over to the Internet Archive and grab yourself a copy of a mid-90s Debian, RH, Slackware, SuSE, Mandrake, ... CD ISO, the file size will be a few hundred MB, the kernel will require less than 4MB of RAM, X will start if you have 8MB of RAM, with about the same in swap space. Then play spot the difference between the cmd line tools, and Xeyes, XPilot, xv, ... versions available in the mid 90s, and required a hundredth of the resources of their present iterations.
I did a video about installing Slackware from the 1990s a few years ago.
@@GaryExplains You could have a play to see how much you could shrink the memory footprint, of a current distribution, if you were to recompile the kernel without USB-4, WiFi, bluetooth, webcam, touch input, asymmetric CPU type support, anything more than SVGA graphics, ... , and compare to the memory foot print of a mid-90s distribution, that only offered kernel modules for your wired NE2000 NIC, S3 graphics, Soundblaster, PS2 mouse and keyboard, if you were lucky.
@AndrewRoberts11 While that could be fun, I don't think the amount of effort it would require vs the number of people who would watch that video, would mean it would be worthwhile!
@@GaryExplains Many enterprises run custom kernels, if not full stacks, with the ~35 years of kernel module bloat pruned (there was that a.out to ELF reworking of the Kernel around 94). Have a play at recompiling the kernel with all the unused filesystems dropped, unused hardware modules dropped, ... , of your chosen VM. You should end up with a smaller kernel, that's also quicker to compile.
@@AndrewRoberts11 I would love to see things like that, especially since I'm curious what's taking up the extra space.
But Gary has a diverse range of topics, he doesn't have the time to do deep dives like that.
It's GNU/Linux Ma'm
LoL, no it isn't. Not only is that not its name, Linux distros like Alpine don't even use any GNU tools or libraries!
@@GaryExplains You are right. I forgot Alpine uses musl. You're off the hook with this case. But all the others are GNU/Linux systems Sir.
Thanks, but the others aren't GNU/Linux either. I have a whole video about the subject.
Interesting Gary, you didn't include Bubbly Linux in your tests... instant thumbs down.... and I'm unsubscribing.... forever!
Thus concludes my impersonation of a typical Linux forum power user.
😂
@@GaryExplains I just replace him, so no worries.😁
i was looking oracle linux but it wasn't ther, 😂
Is that Bubbly Bubbly Oracle Linux or standard Oracle Linux? 😂
Would have been a good comparison to state MS Windows usage after boot and login.
Also would have been nice to see Pop OS with Cosmic figures.
👍
I use Arch with dwm
🤩🤩
Is RAM even a good metric? I don't think it's even a good metric for Windows.
Good metric for what? Estimating how many can spin up on a specific piece of hardware ... yes.
@@htpc002Weirdhouse Only if RAM is the limiting factor. Also, this wasn't strictly about VMs and containers, but also about desktops.
@@graealex RAM often _is_ the limiting factor, especially when it comes to portable computers, like laptops.
@@marioprawirosudiro7301 In the context of laptops, we're usually talking about desktop OS, and then other stuff starts to limit you. MacOS is a great example - it does use significant memory, but the rest of the OS is very optimized, so it runs very smooth.
Or for Linux DEs, being GPU-accelerated makes a big difference in how smooth the GUI will operate. This was even an issue on Windows 7 - using the classic interface over Aero would, despite the simplistic look, make the GUI significantly slower, because without the DWM, stuff would need constant redraws.
@@graealex Yes, desktop OS. On a machine with 8 gigs _soldered-on_ memory (lots of modern laptops, especially those based on Ryzen 7xxx series). Of which around 2 gigs or so would be allocated for VRAM - meaning we only have around 6 gigs to play around with. If the distro itself takes 2 gigs on fresh boot, that's 4 gigs left. At this point, let's hope the user doesn't open too many tabs while browsing...
GPU acceleration would not be the bottleneck here. It's the constant back and forth swapping due to lack of memory.
lost me as soon as you have to go on your junk about Fedora... its as bad as people who have to insert politics into everything, and shows a lot of bias... which means I know I'll get a bad "explanation" when you already show me your biases influence what you do.
You seem confused. To have an opinion isn't bias. You also have an opinion, in that you (I guess) support Fedora or at least don't care. Using your definition of the word 'bias' shows that you are likewise biased. Everyone's 'biases' influence what they do. I thought that was obvious.
@@GaryExplains What I was expecting from the title and previous videos I've seen was more of a informational on the topic in general without opinion/bias influencing the data, maybe just the conclusions. Leaving out something that is extremely common because you don't like what some company, who is very loosely related, influences the validity of the data to me... it puts a wonder in the back of my mind of what else is influenced that you didn't mention. Its fine if that's how you want to do things, I am not saying its right or wrong, and I appreciate you honestly saying at the start why you didn't include it... you realized it was common enough that it should have been included, but you didn't want to. It just lets me know more about the channel and what information I get from you.
@AyaWetts As I said, you seem confused and your reply has done nothing but confirm that. The decision to leave Fedora out doesn't alter the data. I don't appreciate you saying that it does, and slandering me. As you said, I have been upfront and honest. If you think that leaving out Fedora "influences the validity of the data" then I can't help you. Sorry. I think you should do some research about the relationship between Red Hat and Fedora, they aren't "very loosely related", the fact that you think they are tells me enough about your knowledge of Linux.