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Re: Which flavour for a 2GB RAM laptop?

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  Re: Which flavour for a 2GB RAM laptop? Christian Britz <cbritz@t-online.de> - 2022-03-04 12:00 +0100
    Re: Which flavour for a 2GB RAM laptop? Peter Ehlert <pb21a@sdi-baja.com> - 2022-03-04 15:00 +0100
      Re: Which flavour for a 2GB RAM laptop? Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> - 2022-03-04 15:10 +0100
      Re: Which flavour for a 2GB RAM laptop? <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2022-03-04 15:20 +0100
        Re: Which flavour for a 2GB RAM laptop? Ottavio Caruso <ottavio2006-usenet2012@yahoo.com> - 2022-03-05 11:10 +0100
          Re: Which flavour for a 2GB RAM laptop? <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2022-03-05 11:30 +0100
      Re: Which flavour for a 2GB RAM laptop? Hans <hans.ullrich@loop.de> - 2022-03-04 16:20 +0100
        Re: Which flavour for a 2GB RAM laptop? Christian Britz <cbritz@t-online.de> - 2022-03-04 16:30 +0100
    Re: Which flavour for a 2GB RAM laptop? Nicholas Geovanis <nickgeovanis@gmail.com> - 2022-03-04 19:40 +0100

#245867 — Re: Which flavour for a 2GB RAM laptop?

On 2022-03-04 11:47 UTC+0100, Ottavio Caruso wrote:
> One of my memory slot has died, so I am running a Thinkpad with 2GB ram 
> only. I have been told that, even if I put a 4GB ram module in, it won't 
> be as fast as 2x2GB ram (true? Stop me here if I am wrong). Never mind 
> put an 8GB stick; it might not even work.

As far as I know this depends on the design / architecture of the
chipset / motherboard.

> At the moment I'm running a heavily hacked LMDE4 (Buster) with a lot of 
> Mint customisations off. What flavour of Debian should I replace my 
> LMDE4 with? And does it make any difference? My memory hogs are Chromium 
> and Firefox, the rest is ok.
You should run Debian stable for daily use. If performance is your main
concern, try one of the light desktop environments (Xfce, LXDE,
LXQT...). I like the simplicity of LXQT, although I have recently fallen
in love with Cutefish (not yet in Debian).

Regards,
Christian

-- 
http://www.cb-fraggle.de

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#245870

On 3/4/22 02:58, Christian Britz wrote:
>
> On 2022-03-04 11:47 UTC+0100, Ottavio Caruso wrote:
>> One of my memory slot has died, so I am running a Thinkpad with 2GB ram
>> only. I have been told that, even if I put a 4GB ram module in, it won't
>> be as fast as 2x2GB ram (true? Stop me here if I am wrong). Never mind
>> put an 8GB stick; it might not even work.
> As far as I know this depends on the design / architecture of the
> chipset / motherboard.
>
>> At the moment I'm running a heavily hacked LMDE4 (Buster) with a lot of
>> Mint customisations off. What flavour of Debian should I replace my
>> LMDE4 with? And does it make any difference? My memory hogs are Chromium
>> and Firefox, the rest is ok.
> You should run Debian stable for daily use. If performance is your main
> concern, try one of the light desktop environments (Xfce, LXDE,
> LXQT...).

I keep hearing about Xfce being "light"

it defiantly is, but I decided to compare it to my personal favorite Mate

Two fresh netinstalls, same machine, same SSD drive. Xfce and Mate desktops

xfce:  774 MIB ram used .. 4 GIB / space used
mate:  719 MIB ram used .. 6 GIB / space used
mate*:  722 MIB ram used .. 6 GIB / space used

*Mate with the mate-desktop-environment-extras metapackage

I did not stress test either but the apparent speed was the same

> I like the simplicity of LXQT, although I have recently fallen
> in love with Cutefish (not yet in Debian).
>
> Regards,
> Christian
>

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#245871

On Friday,  4 Mar 2022 at 05:56, Peter Ehlert wrote:
> xfce:  774 MIB ram used .. 4 GIB / space used
> mate:  719 MIB ram used .. 6 GIB / space used
> mate*:  722 MIB ram used .. 6 GIB / space used

stumpwm: 86 MB, 1.3 GB ;-)

-- 
Eric S Fraga with org 9.5.2 in Emacs 29.0.50 on Debian 11.2

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#245874

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On Fri, Mar 04, 2022 at 05:56:50AM -0800, Peter Ehlert wrote:

[...]

> I keep hearing about Xfce being "light"
> 
> it defiantly is, but I decided to compare it to my personal favorite Mate
> 
> Two fresh netinstalls, same machine, same SSD drive. Xfce and Mate desktops
> 
> xfce:  774 MIB ram used .. 4 GIB / space used
> mate:  719 MIB ram used .. 6 GIB / space used
> mate*:  722 MIB ram used .. 6 GIB / space used
> 
> *Mate with the mate-desktop-environment-extras metapackage

Or just ditch the desktop environment altogether and use a
honest window manager (e.g. Fvwm ;-)

USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
[...]
root      1867  0.0  0.0   8460  2096 ?        Ss   Mar03   0:00 /usr/bin/xdm
root      1885  0.8  0.3 758372 55104 tty7     Ssl+ Mar03  10:24  \_ /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg :0 vt7 -nolisten tcp -auth /var/lib/xdm/authdir/authfiles/A:0-QCuTrm
root      2088  0.0  0.0  16052  8228 ?        Ss   Mar03   0:00  \_ -:0
tomas     2433  0.0  0.0  80564 14812 ?        Ss   Mar03   0:05      \_ x-window-manager
tomas     2484  0.0  0.0   5964  2692 ?        Ss   Mar03   0:00          \_ /usr/bin/ssh-agent x-window-manager
tomas     2485  0.0  0.0   5612  1324 ?        S    Mar03   0:00          \_ /usr/lib/fvwm/2.6.8/FvwmCommandS 8 5 /home/tomas/.fvwm/config 0 8
tomas     2486  0.0  0.0  76212 11384 ?        S    Mar03   0:00          \_ /usr/lib/fvwm/2.6.8/FvwmButtons 10 5 /home/tomas/.fvwm/config 0 8
tomas     2487  0.0  0.0  76184 12340 ?        S    Mar03   0:00          \_ /usr/lib/fvwm/2.6.8/FvwmPager 11 4 none 0 8 0 0

Yes, that's 15 MB RSS for the window manager, roughly 45 MB counting
in its minions :-)

That's less than one-tenth of one of the many firefox's sprawling
tentacles...

Cheers
-- 
t

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#245951

On 04/03/2022 14:13, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> Or just ditch the desktop environment altogether and use a
> honest window manager (e.g. Fvwm

Is it still around? I used to use it circa 2003...

-- 
Ottavio Caruso

A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

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#245953

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On Sat, Mar 05, 2022 at 10:03:44AM +0000, Ottavio Caruso wrote:
> On 04/03/2022 14:13, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> > Or just ditch the desktop environment altogether and use a
> > honest window manager (e.g. Fvwm
> 
> Is it still around? I used to use it circa 2003...

Yes, of course. It's distributed with Debian. Doesn't change very
much (for me an asset). It does what it has to, I can configure
it as I want -- what's not to like?

Cheers
-- 
t

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#245877

I am a great fan of my old EEEPC, beecause it is tiny and running a long time.

But it is 32-bit, not fast, although I spent him 2GB fast RAM and a SSD.

So I tested with several window managers. There was no number 1 winner, but 
IMO the fastest one was LXDE. Almsot the same speed gave me XFCE (which has a 
little advantage, that it can look like Windows_10).

As LXDE is no more developed, I tries its sucessor, LXQT (a conglomerat of 
RazorQT ans LXDE), which was amazingly just as fast as XFCE (but slower than 
it), but is looking more comfortable than LXDE or XFCE.

Gnome I never tested, because I do not like it personally, but I tested 
Plasma5 (former KDE), and it was still ruunning smooth on my slow netbook. 

However, in Plasma5 I noticed, that the bottom bar is flickering, when I hover 
the mouse over it. This appeared after an update about 2 years ago (guess, 
they changed some code, so it got slower). As this is not a bug at all, I did 
never file it.

So, that is the tests I did. 

How in practice? Well, when I am on the road, I am using often a livefile 
system (here: kali-linux) or the native installed system (here: debian/
bullseye 32-bit), and when I need speed, LXDE ist my first choice, especially 
when running kali. 

For my normal work, when speed does not matter, I am using either LXQT or , 
for comfort and a I am a dinosaur, Plasma5 (you can well work with it, it is 
just 10 percent slower than XFCE).

Conclusion:

If speed is most important: LXDE (maybe sometimes no more available)

If speed is most important and you need Windows_10 look: XFCE

If a good relation between speed and comfort: LXQT

If comfort and some flickering does not matter: Plasma5

There are also other WM available, which may be faster, like fvwm95, openbox, 
twm.

And last but not least, there is TRINITY, which is a modern build of KDE3 (or 
4???), which is running fast and has great comfort.

However, it is not in the debian repo, and it does interfere with Plasma5, but 
it is worth a look. I ran it a while on my EEEPC, but it got interfered with 
Plasma5 (especially kmail), so I deinstalled it. But if you do not want 
install Plasma5, try TRINITY.

Hope this helps!

Best regards

Hans

  



 

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#245878

On 2022-03-04 16:10 UTC+0100, Hans wrote:

> There are also other WM available, which may be faster, like fvwm95, openbox, 
> twm.
amiwm ;-)

-- 
http://www.cb-fraggle.de

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#245902

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On Fri, Mar 4, 2022 at 4:58 AM Christian Britz <cbritz@t-online.de> wrote:

>
> On 2022-03-04 11:47 UTC+0100, Ottavio Caruso wrote:
> > One of my memory slot has died, so I am running a Thinkpad with 2GB ram
> > only. I have been told that, even if I put a 4GB ram module in, it won't
> > be as fast as 2x2GB ram (true? Stop me here if I am wrong). Never mind
> > put an 8GB stick; it might not even work.
>
> As far as I know this depends on the design / architecture of the
> chipset / motherboard.
>

More specifically, get ahold of the doc for your specific model of
Thinkpad. Lenovo/IBM are better than
average for making it available online. There will be a short section on
RAM configuration.
In general, using interleaving across "banks" should be done with sticks at
identical design frequencies
and sizes. But often there you have a choice of interleaving style.


> > At the moment I'm running a heavily hacked LMDE4 (Buster) with a lot of
> > Mint customisations off. What flavour of Debian should I replace my
> > LMDE4 with? And does it make any difference? My memory hogs are Chromium
> > and Firefox, the rest is ok.
> You should run Debian stable for daily use. If performance is your main
> concern, try one of the light desktop environments (Xfce, LXDE,
> LXQT...). I like the simplicity of LXQT, although I have recently fallen
> in love with Cutefish (not yet in Debian).
>
> Regards,
> Christian
>
> --
> http://www.cb-fraggle.de
>
>

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