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

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.

(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.)

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?

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.

Back in the day I used to have a desktop running, with applications, in just 512KB. Getting that memory upgrade to a full 1MB was amazing.

I 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.

I kinda wanna try linux again...

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.

sees lunduke

closes blog post