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Comment by laoganmaplz | Hacker News Reader

Fascinatingly, quite the opposite! For example, the original Macintosh had only a small fraction of that to work with, at 128 Kilobytes![1]

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!

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K

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It was IRIX, not Linux, but UNIX GUI’s were memory hungry (more than their windows counterparts).

The SGI Indy which could be had with an R4000 CPU came with 16MB base

And? People ran FVWM and rxvt on 4MB of RAM for i386. Slow, but with 8MB it was usable, and with 16MB FVWM ran much faster than CDE itself, not to mention rxvt vs dtterm or even xterm.

IIRC from a talk a few years ago, Xorg can be stripped down to around 600KB, so you could probably have a minimal X environment.

TinyCore (on the frontpage a while ago) fits an OS with a FLTK/FLWM desktop in 16 MB of storage⁰, but it requires a bare minimum of 46 MB of RAM to boot (regardless of swap space, which it recommends along with 128 MB of RAM).¹

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/

Tiny X existed and Basic Linux ran in those specs:

https://distro.ibiblio.org/baslinux/

Yes, and also GEOS running in a Commodore 64

Or MirageOS on a TI-83

I don't see why a modern gui should be impossible. It's not like flat design with rounded corners is amazingly complicated. One issue could be high-res assets, but with some codegolfed vector graphics I think you could get something nice looking.

> codegolfed vector graphics

IIRC the Haiku folks had a format for that[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_Vector_Icon_Format

Ok I should have clarified that, I meant available Linux GUI's in reference to OP and IRIX. You'd have to create something from scratch. I don't think you could cram a GUI on par with IRIX in 4mb.

FVWM ran on that. Most people mid 90's ran X with 8-16MB.

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