410
Honestly, 24MB is way too much for this setup (sub.wetshaving.social)
submitted 3 weeks ago by weird@sub.wetshaving.social to c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world
52 comments fedilink hide all child comments
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] pedz@lemmy.ca 77 points 3 weeks ago

I'm always a bit amazed of how things have progressed and on what Linux can still run.

This is an extreme example, but it's also possible to run a modern Linux OS on SBCs like a Raspberry Pi Zero, and still have something somewhat usable depending on your needs.

To have a computer half the size of a credit card with more RAM than my full tower rig from 2001 is amazing. And it can even run software from that era with dosbox or wine.

My 15 years old laptop is still supported and can still read 1080p on YouTube, using Linux.

Linux devs just recently decided to drop support for 486 CPUs and some early Pentiums.

There's just no competition.

[-] henfredemars@infosec.pub 18 points 3 weeks ago

Pretty much the only place it doesnโ€™t run is where you have hard real-time requirements and on extremely small embedded micro controllers.

[-] DmMacniel@feddit.org 17 points 3 weeks ago

But isn't there a RTOS Linux kernel?

[-] Colloidal@programming.dev 15 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Technically yes. But it can't support many hard real-time use cases. For that you need a true RTOS, thought from the ground up for that purpose. Something like VxWorks, QNX, some flavors of L4.

[-] DmMacniel@feddit.org 4 points 3 weeks ago

I miss QNX.

[-] Colloidal@programming.dev 2 points 3 weeks ago

Only ever interacted with 6.0 beta. It was a great microkernel system. Even its GUI, Photon, was of a microkernel design, each module operating as a separate process. And it looked so good.

[-] DeltaWingDragon@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 weeks ago

It's still around. The latest release (8.0) is free-as-in-beer for non-commercial use. It's still proprietary though.

[-] henfredemars@infosec.pub 10 points 3 weeks ago

Sort of. There's realtime builds, but the Linux definition of real time is more relaxed than dedicated RTOS's in exchange for a much more feature-filled OS. You should not use Linux if people could die when you miss a deadline. You want a simple system where it's easier to prove that can never happen.

[-] thepreciousboar@lemm.ee 2 points 3 weeks ago

I believed the kinux kernel recently became real time?

[-] Ephera@lemmy.ml 48 points 3 weeks ago

At $DAYJOB, we've been working on a service which uses Raspberry Pis as edge devices. And our product manager โ€“ bless him โ€“ has made sure we'd have enough hardware budget and wanted to buy only Raspberry Pi 5, so we'd have really good performance.

And I think, we really befuddled him with our reaction, because you know, normally devs won't say no to good hardware, but because our software happens to be efficient and Linux is efficient, we've just been like, eh, a Pi 3B+ is already a lot beefier than we need it.
We had to explain that to him like five times before he actually started to believe it. ๐Ÿ™ƒ

[-] Twinklebreeze@lemmy.world 15 points 3 weeks ago

So you use the raspberry pis to edge, huh? I guess I have another use for my 3b+ that's been collecting dust.

[-] Ephera@lemmy.ml 14 points 3 weeks ago

Yeah, I considered explaining that differently, but figured it doesn't really matter for the story. ๐Ÿ˜…
It's "edge" basically in the sense that it's on-the-edge towards the physical world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_computing

In our case, there's some dumb devices, which wouldn't be able to talk across the internet on their own, so we put Raspberry Pis next to them to hook them up to the internet. In other words, the Raspberry Pis just push network packages through, they're not going to be crunching numbers or whatever.

[-] postmateDumbass@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago

They are making thumbnails next level i guess.

[-] huskypenguin@sh.itjust.works 44 points 3 weeks ago

Those windows requirement are lies.

[-] DickFiasco@lemm.ee 56 points 3 weeks ago

Right? 2 GB for 64-bit Windows 10? The start button alone probably needs more RAM than that.

[-] Sestren@lemmy.world 18 points 3 weeks ago

What else are you going to use your RAM for if not generating advertisement revenue for shareholders.

[-] Shady_Shiroe@lemmy.world 41 points 3 weeks ago

Those windows ram requirements are only to boot into the system, no way 2gb or 4gb enough for normal use

[-] Cenzorrll@lemmy.world 5 points 3 weeks ago

My laptop with 4gb of ram and atom processor came with Windows 10 (I purchased it intending to put Linux on it). I tried it out just to see how W10 worked on it and it was absolutely excruciating and borderline unusable, and I was coming from a Pentium M with 512mb of ram. I have no idea how anyone would have thought it could be a functional system running that.

[-] Asparagus0098@sh.itjust.works 4 points 3 weeks ago

The PCs at my college has only 4GB of RAM with Windows 10. I hate having to use them cause they are so slow.

[-] biggerbogboy@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 weeks ago

I cannot imagine how disgustingly slow your college ones are compared to my high school's ones, which are 16gb ram, i7 boxes running windows 11. They are pretty damn slow even after they recently upgraded them a month ago.

For most things, I just use my laptop since it stutters much less, but using pycharm on my laptop is pretty much impossible due to its lack of specs, so I begrudgingly use the PC.

[-] hexagonwin@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

my extremely crappy cherrytrail atom laptop came with 2gb of ram and win10 32bit. no other os works properly so i just heavily optimized the thing to use like 200mb ram idle. slow but usable.

...but to do this i had to replace explorer.exe with bbzero and get rid of basically every service lol

[-] festnt@sh.itjust.works 20 points 3 weeks ago

ok but what CPU are they using?

[-] weird@sub.wetshaving.social 16 points 3 weeks ago

F1C100s good soc for small stuff.

[-] AnneBonny@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 3 weeks ago
[-] weird@sub.wetshaving.social 9 points 3 weeks ago

This is exactly where I learned about them.

[-] AnneBonny@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

It is really interesting and cool!

[-] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 4 points 3 weeks ago

It is a bit dated at this point

Maybe something like Bouffalo Lab BL808

[-] weird@sub.wetshaving.social 3 points 3 weeks ago

I got a dev board a while back, never got around to messing around with Linux though.

[-] Anomalocaris@lemm.ee 5 points 3 weeks ago

they are optional.

[-] SapphironZA@sh.itjust.works 19 points 3 weeks ago

Now if only browsers can become that lightweight again.

[-] Aarkon@discuss.tchncs.de 16 points 3 weeks ago

Or websites, for that matter

load more comments (3 replies)
[-] einlander@lemmy.world 17 points 3 weeks ago

An esp32 can technically run Linux.

[-] ZkhqrD5o@lemmy.world 15 points 3 weeks ago

Arch users be like: Your system is way too bloated. Have you tried Arch?

[-] meekah@lemmy.world 7 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Honestly making sure my PC only has software installed that I actually use is important to me because my internet is super slow. It took me over 1h yesterday to do a system update. I don't even wanna know how bad it would be if I had more than 2k packages, it's already bad enough now with 1.1k

[-] bruhduh@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago

I once installed whole blackarch repo in my machine, so I'm not sure if my 90gb installation was bloated or not

[-] DeltaWingDragon@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 weeks ago

Gentoo users be like: Your system is underperformant and unoptimized. Have you tried Gentoo, and compiling all the packages?

Other users be like:
Have you tried Slackware?
Have you tried Damn Small Linux?
Have you tried Linux From Scratch?
Have you tried hand-optimizing a 386BSD system with a Mach kernel? OOPS, that's too far!

[-] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 3 weeks ago

Double that and you could probably even run a GUI.

[-] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 weeks ago

There's also twin for framebuffer.

[-] ms_lane@lemmy.world 11 points 3 weeks ago

Linux on system RAM: I sip

Linux on VRAM post-Wayland: BIG GULPS

I used to be able to run a desktop on less than 1GB VRAM, now with 16GB it fills up starts misbehaving.

[-] ryannathans@aussie.zone 16 points 3 weeks ago

Ya might wanna check that because it's not normal

I play star citizen in Wayland and don't even get close to 16GB vram utilisation

[-] DmMacniel@feddit.org 2 points 3 weeks ago

Another penguin o7

[-] tal@lemmy.today 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

I have a 24GB VRAM video card, and the only time I've noticed it using over 16GB is when I'm doing LLM stuff. I don't think that just running under Wayland has ever used much

it's games that ask for video memory.

Though for LLM stuff, I agree heartily. If I could get a video card with 128GB of VRAM (well, for a not-completely-insane price) I would. You can always use more VRAM there.

But that's not really due to Wayland.

[-] ms_lane@lemmy.world 3 points 3 weeks ago

The problem is actually kwin-wayland, kwin5 on X11 was very frgual, where both kwin5 and kwin6 on Wayland eat vram for breakfast. Right now my desktop is using 4535MiB, the biggest user being plasmashell itself at 1120MiB

It's not actually a wayland problem though and If I really wanted I'd of dropped back to X11 when I was still running plasma5 - but Wayland brings more solutions to the table than problems.

[-] tal@lemmy.today 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

https://lemmy.today/post/30379016/16636854

According to a quick search I did, there is (was?) an issue causing excessive memory usage by Wayland compositors with Nvidia's driver; there's a manual fix listed at my link. Is there any chance that you're using Nvidia hardware?

[-] Valmond@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago

I tried to try llms but my 4GB VRAM is just not at all enough, what's the minimum you need in your opinion?

[-] tal@lemmy.today 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

I tried to try llms but my 4GB VRAM is just not at all enough, whatโ€™s the minimum you need in your opinion?

For just using Wayland, 4GB should be fine. I'm using, uh, 801M right now, and it doesn't change that much. I think I've seen it get over 1GB, not to 2GB.

For current 3D games, yeah, I agree, 4GB is very much not enough. If I were getting a card to play 3D games on in 2025, I'd probably aim for 16 GB. Could live with 12GB. 8GB is IMHO not what I would go with for PC gaming in 2025. Lots of stuff can run, but games might need to have texture resolution turned down or something.

For LLM stuff, the sky is the limit. I mean, right now, I have image generation models on my computer that will blow past that, need to live partially in main memory. And I can certainly do things, like generation of images at the full resolution of my screen without upscaling using more-memory-intensive models that will exhaust 24GB of VRAM.

If you're running into problems with 4GB just running normal Wayland apps, something is wrong.

kagis

I see several people using Nvidia GPUs claiming that various scenarios cause their VRAM to be consumed under Wayland. I'm using an AMD GPU on sway myself, so maybe that could be a factor.

https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/multiple-wayland-compositors-not-freeing-vram-after-resizing-windows/307939/12

https://github.com/NVIDIA/egl-wayland/issues/126#issuecomment-2379945259

This is talking about reports of two separate problems that Nvidia is working on related to VRAM usage under wayland. The guy here, one of the NVidia Linux driver guys, is working on one, says that there's a manual fix for one of them, Wayland compositors using a lot of VRAM, and gives it in his comment.

He also says that there are reports of some other issue with Xwayland apps (X11 apps running under Wayland) using a lot of memory, and he hasn't been able to identify that problem.

He made that post nine months ago, so I'd think that they may have rolled the fix he was talking about out to users. I do see several users saying that the manual fix solved their issue at the above links.

[-] ICastFist@programming.dev 9 points 3 weeks ago

I'll just leave this little hummingbird here, it only needs 12MB of RAM and comes with graphics

[-] Taleya@aussie.zone 9 points 3 weeks ago

Why do we keep playing 10, windows died with 7

[-] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 2 points 3 weeks ago

My use of windows died when my XP install died.

load more comments
view more: next โ€บ
this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
410 points (97.7% liked)

linuxmemes

25705 readers
517 users here now

Hint: :q!

Sister communities:

Community rules (click to expand)

1. Follow the site-wide rules

2. Be civil
  • Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
  • Do not harrass or attack users for any reason. This includes using blanket terms, like "every user of thing".
  • Don't get baited into back-and-forth insults. We are not animals.
  • Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
  • Bigotry will not be tolerated.
    • 3. Post Linux-related content
  • Including Unix and BSD.
  • Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of sudo in Windows.
  • No porn, no politics, no trolling or ragebaiting.
    • 4. No recent reposts
  • Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, <loves/tolerates/hates> systemd, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.
    • 5. ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง Language/ัะทั‹ะบ/Sprache
  • This is primarily an English-speaking community. ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ
  • Comments written in other languages are allowed.
  • The substance of a post should be comprehensible for people who only speak English.
  • Titles and post bodies written in other languages will be allowed, but only as long as the above rule is observed.
    • 6. (NEW!) Regarding public figuresWe all have our opinions, and certain public figures can be divisive. Keep in mind that this is a community for memes and light-hearted fun, not for airing grievances or leveling accusations.
  • Keep discussions polite and free of disparagement.
  • We are never in possession of all of the facts. Defamatory comments will not be tolerated.
  • Discussions that get too heated will be locked and offending comments removed.
    • ย 

    Please report posts and comments that break these rules!

    Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't remove France.

    founded 2 years ago
    MODERATORS
    poopsmith@lemmy.world
    zephyr@lemmy.world
    rtxn@lemmy.world