• pedz@lemmy.ca
    5·
    21 days 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.pubEnglish
      1·
      21 days ago

      Pretty much the only place it doesn’t run is where you have hard real-time requirements and on extremely small embedded micro controllers.

        • Colloidal@programming.devEnglish
          1·
          21 days 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.

    • Cenzorrll@lemmy.world
      2·
      20 days 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.

      • biggerbogboy@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        20 days 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·
      13 days 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

  • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    21 days ago

    At $DAYJOB, we’ve been working on a service which uses Raspberry Pis as edge devices. And our product manager – bless him – 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. 🙃

    • DickFiasco@lemm.ee
      1·
      21 days ago

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

  • ms.lane@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    21 days 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.

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      0·
      21 days 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.worldEnglish
        1·
        20 days 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.todayEnglish
          1·
          20 days 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?