Used to build “little old lady” computers for neighbors and such. Say someone gave me their shit PC to fix. Fine. Throw in whatever extra hardware I had, clean it up, new thermal paste and whatnot, small SSD, Linux Lite, Chrome, “Here’s how you get email and internet.” Never once heard from them again.
Here’s the secret sauce; I never once mentioned “linux” or even began explaining what I had done. No need to talk OS, it was “windows” to them! I was there to fix computers, not evangelize.
The RAM impact of the OS is nothing compared to that of modern apps which are all browser-based.
True, but if you are starved for ram, then minimizing the OS use gives more for the rest of the bloated apps you cannot control.
Or you could focus that energy on cleaning out your browser tabs/closing other applications every once in a while and you’d have a better effect :P
This laptop has 32GB of RAM and regularly runs dry due to running both Chrome and Firefox, VScode, Zoom and whatever other random crap. And tuning systemd-oomd to walk the line between “Using 16GB of RAM will instantly kill the entire desktop shell” and “Once you’ve used all 32GB the kernel OOM killer will free something up in 3-5 business decades” is painful too.
Chrome and Firefox, VScode, Zoom and whatever other random crap
So chrome, Firefox, chrome, chrome, and probably more chrome
I actually didn’t know Zoom was Electron, but yes.
Just use the tui-alternative (implemented in Rust, of course). /j
I was running Plex, Jellyfin, Nginx, rtorrent with 3k torrents and few other containers and they were running on a very old machine with 4GB of RAM and only 2GB were really used.
Well sure, but did you also run a hundred unterminable processes that analyzed your behavioral patterns in real time and fed that information into a surveillance pipeline directly hooked into Microsoft data centers?
Because if not, then what are you even doing with your life?
msmpeng.exe
hahahahahahahahahahahaha, I’m ded.
All that extra telemetry that you can’t turn off uses a lot of resources it seems
I am honestly amazed at how efficient puppy linux is, firefox is pretty usable on a 2gb (originally) windows XP machine.
Removed by mod
Experienced users are known for being able to customize their install to be lightweight enough to function with modern tasks on old hardware. I myself have an install on an old 4gb MacBook Air that runs just as well as my server with 64 gb of RAM for the task load that I’ve deployed on it.
4gigs is a perfectly reasonable amount of RAM for word processing, web browsing, retro gaming, basic development (if you’ve got another rig to deploy compilations to), and a whole host of other applications.
“Nu uh. Nu uh. Nu uh. Lalalalalalalalallalala. Biden.” / You
