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A 4GB machine is nowadays too weak for Big Corps. Linux maybe they did agreement with hardware vendors, as I suspect, to help them in selling not needed new hardware cause sales are plunging.
A crazy friend give me some days ago a 4 years old 17" HP Laptop with a Core I5 4210U 8GB ram and a 256GB SDD (I keep it as last resort cause I need portability that's why I use old netbooks).
On it he installed Makulu Linux Core derived from Debian so without snapd and all other Ubuntu candies and anyway the bare system as soon as switched on has a memory consumption of 586MB.
On the same machine I had run live AUSTRUMI a Slackware derivative without systemd and Canonical eye candies it runs with 184MB.
It's impossibile to find Kubuntu system requirement and this is not so polite but looking at standard Ubuntu (with Gnome 3) requirements....
ychaouche is forced to upgrade the ram or switch to a true GNU/Linux distro not bloated with useless services and which wastes ram to load more than once and maybe more than twice the same library only in different version to install with a click statically linked executable.
Sad to say but this is the truth, a machine with 4GB ram which I could use still for years for a newbie or for who follows the herd is an ewaste.
Hope this helped.
I'm here to help eventually in choosing and using other to avoid to give away money for a not needed memory upgrade or ever worse to toss a still perfect functioning PC only cause a Big Corp has decided so.
Btw. @ychaouche if you want a KDE out of the box suitable for newcomers give a spin to PCLinuxOS
It has KDE but a minimum memory requirement which is an half of Ubuntu Desktop 2GB minimum instead of 4GB
Let us know!
That is one thing I do love about Linux, it works great on older hardware. With just a little bit of digging and research, you can find the perfect distro that will perform excellent on your machine. I'm testing out a distro (Peppermint) on an old Pentium 4 machine with 2GB of RAM. It's running right now and only using 270MB of RAM and has a nice GUI. I've got a quad core laptop too with 4GB of RAM running Linux Mint which is light on resources as well. I would rather my RAM be utilized for my programs moreso than running the GUI. I often think that if I had a lot of RAM, I'd still try to be lightweight with it. Really, IMO, one of the bigger memory killers is web browsing...go to those webpages with all their animations, graphics, etc.
No, KDE itself is very heavy-weight and resource hungry. So better to avoid....
So I guess even though it claims to be a lightweight desktop, XFCE must be very heavy-weight and resource hungry too. As indicated by my reply #12 here, in latest version of KDE it and XFCE weigh very nearly the same.
So I guess even though it claims to be a lightweight desktop, XFCE must be very heavy-weight and resource hungry too. As indicated by my reply #12 here, in latest version of KDE it and XFCE weigh very nearly the same.
why do you think they are nearly the same?
Quote:
Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment for UNIX-like operating systems. It aims to be fast and low on system resources, while still being visually appealing and user friendly.
Because I digested the info at that URL before posting the link to it here. I don't see enough difference there between the two to say unequivocally one is "lightweight" while the other is "very heavy". Both should be in the same weight class, whatever that class may be.
I'm testing out a distro (Peppermint) on an old Pentium 4 machine with 2GB of RAM. It's running right now and only using 270MB of RAM and has a nice GUI.
You have a strange concept of lightness.
With such ram on a distro without spyware and useless system you can run also xfce with standalone apps.
This is not XFCE but some app and the system... 92MB ram eye candies included.
Not from yesterday but numbers and numbers matter, not opinion of generalist sites.
And numbers don't lie as humans do.
Ubuntu is heavy by itself (4GB minimum required for the version with the "lighter" Gnome shell if more than 700MB only for the DE are "few") added with KDE is out of scope for 4GB machine.
With such ram on a distro without spyware and useless system you can run also xfce with standalone apps.
This is not XFCE but some app and the system... 92MB ram eye candies included.
I know I could go lighter but a part of me really wanted to give Peppermint a try and this was one of the few machines I could get it to cooperate on. It's just for testing/trying out anyways...nothing I am going to use in everyday computing. I like tinkering, testing, and trying out different distros on a lot of my old hardware that's been collecting dust. Also, I've just recently been diving back into Linux computing as a "desktop" from a big hiatus. So far for lightweight options I've tried: Linux Mint Cinnamon, Peppermint, Debian with MATE, and antiX...I think they all have performed very well.
Never tried JWM, but I did try IceWM back when I was using Puppy Linux. It did well. Most GUIs I have been fine with, but XFCE is one I just never really cared for.
Was anything there tested side by side on identical hardware? There's no mention there which versions were tested, or any numbers other than publication date and the version of Gnome that Mate was based upon. If not the latest KDE version, Plasma was probably misrepresented. It's been on a weight loss program to eliminate its reputation for bloat.
I like tinkering, testing, and trying out different distros on a lot of my old hardware that's been collecting dust.
I too cause such hardware can serve people in needs.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Basslord1124
Never tried JWM, but I did try IceWM back when I was using Puppy Linux. It did well. Most GUIs I have been fine with, but XFCE is one I just never really cared for.
You have tried JWM cause Puppy Linux uses JWM
antiX instead uses IceWM as standard desktop manager but clicking F1 at the login screen you can use JWM, Fluxbox or HerbstluftWM (something like Monad, i3 aso keyboard driven).
XFCE is the joker of desktop manager.
With it you can easily resemble a windows like user interface or a Mac like one with little tweaking.
Was anything there tested side by side on identical hardware? There's no mention there which versions were tested, or any numbers other than publication date and the version of Gnome that Mate was based upon. If not the latest KDE version, Plasma was probably misrepresented. It's been on a weight loss program to eliminate its reputation for bloat.
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