I recently found out about a Linux Distro named Q4OS and I wanted to test out their claim that it only requires 256 MB of ram when using the trinity desktop environment. However, when I used the live cd in virt-manager with 256 MB or ram, it just kernel panicked at boot. So I then tried it with 512 MB of ram. In addition to some issues that are not present when you are using at least 1 GB of ram, such as “sudo apt update” causing the entire VM to become unresponsive, I noticed that it seemed to actually use anywhere between 290 MB to 370 MB of ram when the only thing running was the process viewer (which is htop).

Obviously, this is still very low for a modern Linux distro but I was wondering how accurate VMs are for testing ram usage.

And, yes I know that it would be pretty much useless on a PC that only had 256 MB of ram even if it did work. I’m actually checking the ram usage because there is a possibility that I may be using a very old computer of mine that only has 1 GB of ram at some point in the future. So I’m just testing it and eventually other distros out to to see which one I’m going to end up using (assuming I do actually end up even using that computer).

Edit: I just tried the 32-bit version in virt-manager and htop stated it was only using 232 MB of ram, which means that their claim was right and that I might have been using the wrong version. Also, because someone mentioned that live cds can use more ram, I will try actually installing the 64-bit version but I’ll have to do that tomorrow because I’m about to go to bed.

  • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
    2·
    5 months ago

    Yes their benchmarks will have been on a normal system, installed on the disk. If it is the live USB, everything should be loaded to RAM (Clonezilla can run completely from RAM) so that you dont suffer from the USB bottleneck.

    Why do you care about low RAM? This often means, that the system is very inefficient. If you cache stuff in RAM, your system gets faster and you save SDD read/writes, which increases its lifespan.

    RAM lasts near forever. If you have more, the system should use more. If you use the system and run very intense programs, the system should adapt and use less. But if you are one of the dudes running Arch with 32GB of RAM, the system should cache everything it has.