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Comment by jmclnx | Hacker News Reader

>Linux's advantage is slowly shrinking

Maybe in some ways, yes. But there are distros out there that can run easily in as little as 1G RAM. And I heard people have used it with far less.

I also remember hearing Ubuntu moved to default to Wayland, if true I have to wonder if defaulting to Wayland is part of the problem because Gnome / KDE on Wayland will use far more memory than FVWM / Fluxbox on X11.

FWIW, you can do a lot just from the console without a GUI w/Linux and any BSD, in that case the RAM usage will be tiny compared to Windows and Apple.

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> But there are distros out there that can run easily in as little as 1G RAM

It always make me chuckle when I hear this. Default server (ie no GUI at all) installation of a RHEL derivative just outright dies silently with 1GB of RAM if there is no swap. Sure with the enabled swap it no longer dies but to say what the performance is anywhere performant is to lie to yourself.

RHEL is not the be-all end-all of minimalist linux, even sans GUI. Puppy Linux, with a full WM, is completely usable with a single gig of ram. That's obviously a different use-case from RHEL but the point stands.

If the point is the minimal footprint then MS-DOS would win. Now install and run at least 70% of the software available even without EPEL in Puppy?

RHEL/RHEL-like, just like Ubuntu is thevgeneral purpose distroes and the point of the minimal sysrq for running is for them, not for the excercises in the RAM golfing.

Not to mention that 'lower memory usage' is only one of many benefits and, at least before the prices went mad, hardly the most important one on the list.

Practically speaking most people would want a GUI though.

Sure - what I mean is that being able to run an equivalent GUI to Windows (Gnome, KDE) using less memory than Windows requires is a benefit, but not the most important one to me. There are other bigger benefits to using Linux+GUI instead of Windows than saving on a bit of RAM.

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