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Comment by schemescape | Hacker News Reader

Mind sharing more details on your setup? (Distribution, window manager, and, most importantly, browser)

I have something similar (but an even older netbook). I'm using Alpine, i3, and mostly w3m (or Midori if JavaScript is needed). Given that Windows 10 on the netbook was completely unusable, it's impressive how functional it is with Linux.

It cannot handle modern bloat, however. Firefox just eats up memory until the machine freezes and I can't run a single Electron app for too long. Sadly, those make up far more than 1% of my use cases.

Overall, it's nice for distraction-free computing. I learned Common Lisp and Emacs exclusively on that little netbook. I probably would have gotten distracted by some shiny web page partway through if I'd been using my more capable desktop.

Edit to clarify: I'm curious what all you're able to accomplish with your similarly spec'd machine.

View on HN

It's mostly a standard Xubuntu with full disk encryption (just in case the machine gets stolen while travelling) i3 might be even better. I use that at work, but was too lazy to configure it on this machine.

I have desnapped it though and download Firefox directly from Mozilla. There is no Chromium on it.

Edit: I know that it would choke on opening an ever growing number of Firefox tabs. I just close them. And I don't run the machine for more than a couple of hours before shutting it down. Don't use suspend at all.

Edit2: It uses swap. Don't remember whether that was the standard setup or whether I added it myself. Of course you cannot rely on swap for responsive operation, but it helps parking some unused data because the desktop/distro is not optimized at all. And it helps you to get over a tight situation when you forget to close something. When it slows down it's a nice reminder to do so.

Thanks! Good to know that Firefox is working for you, even with only 1 GB of memory. I'll need to ponder why my experience was so much worse...

Edit to add, in case anyone's curious: suspend works for me (but not hibernate).

It works, but do applications just grow their memory consumption over time? I woudn't be overly surprised.

Please note that I had to correct the 1GB to 2GB. Sorry for giving incorrect data first.

Firefox can indeed work with only 1GB, although so little RAM imposes some restrictions on the OS and desktop used. Here are two VM examples: Alpine Linux and DietPi, both using XFCE as desktop manager, with Firefox plus HN front page loaded and one terminal window.

https://ibb.co/4PXrGtF

https://ibb.co/DwcTrQp

Is that a setup you use regularly, with other apps? How is your swap space configured?

My lived experience on Alpine, with no desktop environment on 1 GB is that Firefox needs more memory than that. Browsing the super-lightweight HN site is probably ok, though!

That one was just a test on a VM.

Install zram:

    sudo modprobe zram

    sudo zramctl --find --size 1024M

   sudo mkswap /dev/zram0

   sudo swapon /dev/zram0 --priority -1

i3 is great, can def recommend for a lightweight computing experience. I run it on my Thinkpad X230 with OpenBSD. perfect setup IMO!

For travel is use a 10" intel atom + 4G RAM convertible tablet with touch screen (Lenovo brand) that runs Void Linux + Gnome. If it had 2G of RAM i'd run xfce but that would harm the detached-keyboard use-case. Once it's past LUKS passphrase prompt in initramfs, i can use it with the touch-screen only for simple tasks. It's fine for use with a decent amount of tabs in firefox, reading mail in thunderbird and writing code in vim if i have to.

Setup ZRAM in Alpine and you'll be amazed.

I think zswap is better than zram in general.

Both are almost the same concept, but YMMV on performance. ZRAM has an easy setup at least.

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