477
Honestly, 24MB is way too much for this setup (sub.wetshaving.social)
submitted 2 months ago by weird@sub.wetshaving.social to c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world
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[-] pedz@lemmy.ca 90 points 2 months 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.

[-] Ephera@lemmy.ml 53 points 2 months 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. πŸ™ƒ

[-] Twinklebreeze@lemmy.world 21 points 2 months 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 19 points 2 months ago

Yeah, I considered explaining that differently, but figured it doesn't really matter for the story. πŸ˜…
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 3 points 2 months ago

They are making thumbnails next level i guess.

[-] huskypenguin@sh.itjust.works 46 points 2 months ago

Those windows requirement are lies.

[-] DickFiasco@lemm.ee 65 points 2 months ago

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

[-] Sestren@lemmy.world 19 points 2 months ago

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

[-] MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 2 points 2 months ago

The start button alone probably needs more RAM than that.

Nah, just all the ad telemetry gathered whenever the user hits the start button!

[-] SapphironZA@sh.itjust.works 30 points 2 months ago

Now if only browsers can become that lightweight again.

[-] Aarkon@discuss.tchncs.de 22 points 2 months ago

Or websites, for that matter

[-] BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works 5 points 2 months ago
[-] SapphironZA@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 months ago

While I appreciate the dedication, I am looking for something more akin to firefox 4.0 levels of functionality and resources usage.

Back when your browser used around 512mb of RAM when you had 40 tabs open.

[-] hexagonwin@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 month ago

seamonkey is pretty good actually

[-] ICastFist@programming.dev 23 points 2 months ago

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

[-] sup@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 months ago

Wow, that's crazy

[-] ZkhqrD5o@lemmy.world 20 points 2 months ago

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

[-] meekah@lemmy.world 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months 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

[-] DeltaWingDragon@sh.itjust.works 7 points 2 months 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!

[-] StellarSt0rm@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

Have you tried NixOS? (I use NixOS btw)

[-] bruhduh@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

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

[-] einlander@lemmy.world 20 points 2 months ago

An esp32 can technically run Linux.

[-] festnt@sh.itjust.works 19 points 2 months ago

ok but what CPU are they using?

[-] weird@sub.wetshaving.social 16 points 2 months ago

F1C100s good soc for small stuff.

[-] AnneBonny@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 2 months ago
[-] weird@sub.wetshaving.social 11 points 2 months ago

This is exactly where I learned about them.

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

It is really interesting and cool!

[-] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 5 points 2 months ago

It is a bit dated at this point

Maybe something like Bouffalo Lab BL808

[-] weird@sub.wetshaving.social 4 points 2 months ago

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

[-] Anomalocaris@lemm.ee 6 points 2 months ago

they are optional.

[-] Taleya@aussie.zone 16 points 2 months ago

Why do we keep playing 10, windows died with 7

[-] mittorn@masturbated.one 4 points 2 months ago

@Taleya @weird it's died with vista (last windows, supporting hardware profiles), or with end of xp support

[-] Taleya@aussie.zone 4 points 2 months ago

nah, I'd say 7. Solid OS, the Ps2 of windows releases

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

My use of windows died when my XP install died.

[-] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 15 points 2 months ago

Double that and you could probably even run a GUI.

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

There's also twin for framebuffer.

[-] ms_lane@lemmy.world 13 points 2 months 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.today 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months 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 5 points 2 months 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 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months 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 2 points 2 months 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 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months 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?

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.

this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
477 points (100.0% liked)

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