First, I would like to say congratulations for Slackware 15

I usually had Slackware 14.2 on my PC but I bought a new PC desktop (2 years ago) and it was impossible to run 14.2. Now I am so exciting with Slackware 15 stable edition, so I am back. The last 2 years with my "new" PC I was running Arch and when Slackware 15 stable edition was here I installed it on Virtual Machine first but after 2 - 3 days I have completed removed Arch and Slackware is my main system now. Now the issues.

First when I was running Slackware on VM the RAM with htop command was 550 to 600 MB and that was normal it was what I was expecting from Slackware but when I removed Arch from my system and installed Slackware with the same installation steps as before the RAM is closed to 900 to 1000 MB and I don't know why it takes so much ram (as a clean installation, no firefox nothing just the terminal with htop command).

Second strange issue when I added a user with the adduser command it was impossible to start startx. I looked on the internet for solutions, I was knew that you must logout from root and start the machine with the user account but no luck. That was strange. I solve it by running xinit as a user, and then I was able to start startx.

It looks good so far I am so happy to be back with Slackware and at the moment is a clean system with 64bit only I haven't installed steam etc for games (I'm not really fan of games) but I like 0ad and this is already installed I'm using Slackware mainly for programming like Django, web design, python etc.

Thank you

RAM usage: this is normal and observable with any OS: VM has less RAM dedicated than bare bone. Moder OSes will utilize RAM efficiently and detect use whatever is available.
If you want to experiment, then remove Some of your RAM memory and restart Slackware, you will notice that it uses less RAM.

Second, regarding startx and adduser, I have one four years old installation of Slackware current and one installation one year old so I can't comment on the status of adduer and startx. Probably something simple is missing e.g. user rights.

Hope this will help a bit.

Edit: Aeterna posted while I was writing this. Oh well. :-)

Assuming the Slackware64 15.0 installs are truly identical, the only thing I can think of is that the VM was sufficiently different to your bare metal that the kernel was managing memory differently. Leaving aside differences with the virualised CPU, if the VM's RAM allocation is significantly smaller than that of the physical hardware then I expect that process memory might be managed or allocated differently. This could lead to a smaller amount reported as used by htop.

The kernel uses otherwise unused RAM for caching (see the output of "free"). Less system memory could reduce the amount used by the kernel for caching and initially I thought that this might influence what is reported as used by htop. However, tests here indicate that the amount of used memory reported by htop excludes caches, so that's not relevant here.

Sorry, I'm not sure about this one. It's not something I've personally experienced, although admittedly I don't use adduser all that often. I just tried it on my Slackware64 15.0 box and after finishing adduser, I could log in to a text console as the new user and "startx" worked fine. I did notice that choosing the "Quit" option from the desktop menu didn't seem to do anything so I had to kill the session with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace. However, that's a separate issue; startx itself did work.

We would probably need more information about what happened when you tried "startx" in order to provide further suggestions (error messages, for example, or the content of /var/log/Xorg.log following an unsuccessful "startx" attempt).

For startx issue : have you issued xwmconfig ? Not sure it's compulsory but I always do (perhaps because I use a third party WM).

It';s always good to see someone appreciate the value of Slackware,perhaps especially this new final release. It really is rather exemplary.

I truly don't understand this problem unless maybe it was a VM issue. I'm running an Asus Maximus Hero XII Z490 system currently with an i5-10600K (soon to be i5-11600K for PCIe v4 activation and support) that was new 2 years ago and not only do I have a fairly stock 14.2 64bit system working fine but a 32bit version as well, and modified by kernel upgrade versions back as far as 12.2 that run just fine with the only problems being what versions on nvidia installer will compile and what browsers work properly.

This is mentioned because I suppose it may be possible that something in your installation or configuration may also contribute to your other difficulties. Some examples might be do you install Full Recommended Install? Do you update kernels? Do you update kernel firmware? firmware?

<snip>

FWIW there is no requirement to logout root to startx as User. A simple Alt-F2 will display a 2nd login prompt that will startx as User, Also from the root prompt, sddm will launch the Login Chooser/Display Manager allowing any user or root to launch whichever WM/DE you desire as well as Wayland variants if you're not using nvidia GPU. If you edit /etc/inittab to default to runlevel 4, unless you also select a default X User, you will stop briefly at the sddm login/chooser by default with no initial login.

Some games won't run on Steam without a multilib install so if you run into that it's easily fixed either manually or via slackpkgplus. It's good to have you back. Hope this helps even a little bit. Best wishes.

Thank you all for your answers

I'm really happy with Slackware right now, and I will stay as long this project is on

Some answers to the above questions: Yes, I did FULL install, I am always updating my Slackware and the kernels too and updating the grub. No multilib for me at the moment, I'm happy to keep 64 libraries only anyway I'm not a gamer ... and again thank you ALL for your answers.


Slackware rules

My slackware64-15.0 VirtualBox VM has a Base Memory of 2048 with 2 CPU's (Host runs slackware64-current, 8 GiB, 4 CPU's), htop shows 109M/1.93G

I use adduser to add users. I have never experienced this. I use the default mode of Slackware runlevel 3, I don't us xwmconfig since KDE Plasma is the default. I log in as a user, then startx.

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