Lightweight Linux Distributions and Graphics Drivers
Greetings. I've not looked recently but from memory and the discussion yesterday seems people have a use case for them. Off the top of my memory the three ideal candidates depending on what you requirements would be: 1. Arch or Gentoo if your fine rolling basically your own distro with a package manager 2. Debian - Any version with a lightweight desktop should work 3. Debian unstable derivatives based on Debian unstable. Seems there were a lot, the only issue was some like antix were 32 bit, but it now seems to have a 64 bit version. They recommend 256 mems of ram and I was able to open like 3 "normal tabs without hitting swap in firefox with that. Idles between 0 and 3% of a single core from a i5 2500K at 4.2 Ghz in a VM. Rarely hits 3 percent at idle, through mostly its a flat 0% to 1% usage. Even on that amount of hardware it was surprisingly fast. And yes it can probably run YouTube 1080p on a Pentium 4 with enough ram, didn't try through. https://antixlinux.com/ Debian or Arch would be best if your using GPU packages as those would be in either AUR, the user Arch repo probably or another non distribution repo for Debian. Also to my knowledge outside of Nvidia and a few ARM vendors most GPUs are upstreamed in Mesa these days. The problem is that Nvidia has been the only real choice in the high end due to it performing better there for the last few years, there are rumors of Intel building discrete cards through: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-xe-graphics-all-we-know Maybe that helps some people as I forget to mention this yesterday, Nick -- Fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism--something it is like for the organism. - Thomas Nagel
I thought Arch dropped their 32 bit versions a year or so ago, but there's an archlinux32.org site that seems to support a fork. On Wed, 13 May 2020 at 16:50, Nicholas Krause via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
Greetings.
I've not looked recently but from memory and the discussion yesterday seems people have a use case for them. Off the top of my memory the three ideal candidates depending on what you requirements would be:
1. Arch or Gentoo if your fine rolling basically your own distro with a package manager 2. Debian - Any version with a lightweight desktop should work 3. Debian unstable derivatives based on Debian unstable. Seems there were a lot, the only issue was some like antix were 32 bit, but it now seems to have a 64 bit version. They recommend 256 mems of ram and I was able to open like 3 "normal tabs without hitting swap in firefox with that. Idles between 0 and 3% of a single core from a i5 2500K at 4.2 Ghz in a VM. Rarely hits 3 percent at idle, through mostly its a flat 0% to 1% usage. Even on that amount of hardware it was surprisingly fast. And yes it can probably run YouTube 1080p on a Pentium 4 with enough ram, didn't try through. https://antixlinux.com/
Debian or Arch would be best if your using GPU packages as those would be in either AUR, the user Arch repo probably or another non distribution repo for Debian.
Also to my knowledge outside of Nvidia and a few ARM vendors most GPUs are upstreamed in Mesa these days. The problem is that Nvidia has been the only real choice in the high end due to it performing better there for the last few years, there are rumors of Intel building discrete cards through: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-xe-graphics-all-we-know
Maybe that helps some people as I forget to mention this yesterday, Nick
-- Fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism--something it is like for the organism. - Thomas Nagel
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On 5/13/20 6:25 PM, Don Tai wrote:
I thought Arch dropped their 32 bit versions a year or so ago, but there's an archlinux32.org <http://archlinux32.org> site that seems to support a fork.
That's correct. I mentioned it does depend on your use case through. Nick
On Wed, 13 May 2020 at 16:50, Nicholas Krause via talk <talk@gtalug.org <mailto:talk@gtalug.org>> wrote:
Greetings.
I've not looked recently but from memory and the discussion yesterday seems people have a use case for them. Off the top of my memory the three ideal candidates depending on what you requirements would be:
1. Arch or Gentoo if your fine rolling basically your own distro with a package manager 2. Debian - Any version with a lightweight desktop should work 3. Debian unstable derivatives based on Debian unstable. Seems there were a lot, the only issue was some like antix were 32 bit, but it now seems to have a 64 bit version. They recommend 256 mems of ram and I was able to open like 3 "normal tabs without hitting swap in firefox with that. Idles between 0 and 3% of a single core from a i5 2500K at 4.2 Ghz in a VM. Rarely hits 3 percent at idle, through mostly its a flat 0% to 1% usage. Even on that amount of hardware it was surprisingly fast. And yes it can probably run YouTube 1080p on a Pentium 4 with enough ram, didn't try through. https://antixlinux.com/
Debian or Arch would be best if your using GPU packages as those would be in either AUR, the user Arch repo probably or another non distribution repo for Debian.
Also to my knowledge outside of Nvidia and a few ARM vendors most GPUs are upstreamed in Mesa these days. The problem is that Nvidia has been the only real choice in the high end due to it performing better there for the last few years, there are rumors of Intel building discrete cards through: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-xe-graphics-all-we-know
Maybe that helps some people as I forget to mention this yesterday, Nick
-- Fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism--something it is like for the organism. - Thomas Nagel
--- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org <mailto:talk@gtalug.org> Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
-- Fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism--something it is like for the organism. - Thomas Nagel
On Wed, 13 May 2020 at 16:50, Nicholas Krause via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
I've not looked recently but from memory and the discussion yesterday seems people have a use case for them. Off the top of my memory the three ideal candidates depending on what you requirements would be:
1. Arch or Gentoo if your fine rolling basically your own distro with a package manager 2. Debian - Any version with a lightweight desktop should work 3. Debian unstable derivatives based on Debian unstable. Seems there were a lot, the only issue was some like antix were 32 bit, but it now seems to have a 64 bit version. They recommend 256 mems of ram and I was able to open like 3 "normal tabs without hitting swap in firefox with that. Idles between 0 and 3% of a single core from a i5 2500K at 4.2 Ghz in a VM. Rarely hits 3 percent at idle, through mostly its a flat 0% to 1% usage. Even on that amount of hardware it was surprisingly fast. And yes it can probably run YouTube 1080p on a Pentium 4 with enough ram, didn't try through. https://antixlinux.com/
I would strongly suggest NOT using anything based on Debian unstable in these circumstances. Unstable is meant for developers. Sure, it's totally up-to-date when it's made available, but here's the problem: if they don't follow the Debian unstable repositories, they're not getting the updates they should. If they DO follow the Debian unstable repositories, doing updates is like drinking from a fire hose - the package thrash is huge. A few years back I installed a "lightweight" distro made on this model: it installed easily, using about 1G on a 2G partition. It ran well. Two months later I booted the machine and casually typed 'apt-get dist-upgrade' ... and the process filled the entire hard drive with packages and crashed the machine, without ever getting to actually doing the upgrade. Not a good model.
Debian or Arch would be best if your using GPU packages as those would be in either AUR, the user Arch repo probably or another non distribution repo for Debian.
Also to my knowledge outside of Nvidia and a few ARM vendors most GPUs are upstreamed in Mesa these days. The problem is that Nvidia has been the only real choice in the high end due to it performing better there for the last few years, there are rumors of Intel building discrete cards through: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-xe-graphics-all-we-know
Maybe that helps some people as I forget to mention this yesterday, Nick
-- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr@gmail.com
On Thu, May 14, 2020 at 12:18:09PM -0400, Giles Orr via talk wrote:
I would strongly suggest NOT using anything based on Debian unstable in these circumstances. Unstable is meant for developers. Sure, it's totally up-to-date when it's made available, but here's the problem: if they don't follow the Debian unstable repositories, they're not getting the updates they should. If they DO follow the Debian unstable repositories, doing updates is like drinking from a fire hose - the package thrash is huge. A few years back I installed a "lightweight" distro made on this model: it installed easily, using about 1G on a 2G partition. It ran well. Two months later I booted the machine and casually typed 'apt-get dist-upgrade' ... and the process filled the entire hard drive with packages and crashed the machine, without ever getting to actually doing the upgrade.
I have seen distributions (like mint) that are debian testing based. I have never seen any based on unstable, so not sure which ones those would be. -- Len SOrensen
participants (4)
-
Don Tai -
Giles Orr -
lsorense＠csclub.uwaterloo.ca -
Nicholas Krause