But the N64 only has 4MB of ram, I think a GUI would be beyond it's capabilities. Still a cool project though.
Certainly a modern GUI a la KDE, Gnome and friends would be well outside of its abilities, but a functional GUI is possible on a shockingly small amount of memory!
IIRC the Haiku folks had a format for that[1].
The SGI Indy which could be had with an R4000 CPU came with 16MB base
OTOH KnightOS² (not Linux) has a rudimentary (obviously not Xorg) GUI that IIUC runs on TI-73 series graphing calculators with 25 KB of RAM.
⁰http://tinycorelinux.net/welcome.html ¹http://tinycorelinux.net/faq.html#req ²https://knightos.org/
And Windows 95 only required 4MB, so it should be within the realm of possibility,
Berkeley Systems, of course, is known for BSD.
There are significantly less bloated desktop environments, but people like their bling, and bling by default includes an accompanying increase in resource consumption.
Look at Raspbian. It looks pretty good, but uses a lot less resources than gnome and kde. You can add to it if you want it to be as bloated as the typical desktop environments. But it's a choice.
Personally I'm in love with tiling desktops which use even less resources yet. And they're blazingly fast.
A lot of it is merely feature creep. Remember when OSX used to have animations (like applications minimizing like a genie getting sucked back into its kettle) as a feature you could turn on if you wanted it? Now it's pretty much default, and most people don't know you can shut that stuff off. And that's how things get sluggish. Sexy new "advanced" features become default, and you always need faster computers and more memory to keep up.
If you insist on using Gnome or KDE, obviously bloated because everything has extra features enabled by default, then then shut those resource hogs off. You'll start to get back to fast desktop days again. Some people will miss the bling, but you can't have one without the other. You can't expect all that sweet sweet bling without the resources being tied up to make it happen.
The rest, the part you are complaining about bloating is the GNU part. I'm not complaining about that GNU part, btw. I've lived in it since the early 90's. But the Linux kernel can be as slim and responsive as you want it to be if you are willing to compile yourself. You can even compile it as an RTOS, and you can never convince me that would be too sluggish.
What I got voted down for was pointing out that Linux-proper wasn't the slow part of that blend. It was the desktop. And that part is GNU, not Linux. Period.
I actually had a gig with SLS Soft Landing back in the day. It wasn't unrelated to the stuff I was doing with uucp at the time. That was important then, but totally not at all today, lol.
I am assuming you are making a bit of a jest, because things have moved along in the past many decades.
You are right. Linux has evolved tremendously over the past ~30 years. Those early times were fun though...
(It won't be running Gtk4 or Qt6 of course.)
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nintendo...
>It's also noted that Linux on the Nintendo 64 is still a big buggy and "constantly flirting with [out of memory]."
If you're running out of ram with just a shell that definitely doesn't leave much left. And there's no storage device, so you can't swap.
IIRC, there used to be a GBALinux as well. That's what, 1/8th of the memory?
That this port is OOM-ing is just it being buggy.
There's the cartridge. And yes, while technically that's supposed to be ROM, flashcarts like the EverDrive are able to get creative with that, and I can see that being a viable pathway to achieving something approximately resembling swapping.