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Microsoft Flight Simulator: A whole airplane on the couch
well it’s in the name
“Microsoft”
yeah sure close enough! :)
But there’s so much room for ACTIVITIES!!!
And on linux, so much room for cache that doesn’t have to be dumped to disk!
I wish I was a cat
I wish you were a cat too
…name checks out
Am i the only one who still has no problems with 8GB? Not that I wouldn’t be happy with more but i can’t remember the last time I’ve even thought about ram usage
it’s almost like the ram usage depends on the software / services you need to run /s
If your job requires you to use chrome and vscode, 8GB is usually not enough :/
I use potato PC with just 8GB of ram to work. I regularly use VSCode and docker. It still run smoothly when I use it properly. lol.
Guessing you don’t run a couple docker containers to support local development;-)
At my last WFH job my daily setup was firefox, sublime text, slack (electron app), github desktop (also electron), and 3 terminals, one running a local dev server. It all ran fine.
you just need more things to run on it
Y’all need to point me towards one of those tiny Linux systems. I have an old no-longer-bricked Toshiba Satellite that somebody gave me and I got it to boot again, so I slapped Mint on it to see how I liked it since I’ve never messed with that distro before. The only problem is this sucker is a dog, it’s only got 2 gigs of RAM and a pokey 5400 RPM platter drive in it. The thing sits there and thrashes swap constantly even when it’s doing nothing, and when Mint is creating one of its automated system image rollback things it’s completely unusable. I’m surprised the laptop platters don’t escape their casing and bore into the Earth like a drill bit.
I found that it will… eventually… load and run the latest FreeCAD build and once it’s going it’s actually not bad (awful screen resolution and single touch only trackpad notwithstanding). But getting there when taken altogether takes about 20 minutes…
Antix will run on old grey boxes with mb of ram, it oughta work for you too.
More than enough for MX Linux with Xfce. But it’s not going to make your applications a whole lot faster.
can you not disable swap? force it to stick to physical RAM.
You absolutely need swap on a low RAM system. It’s the only way the system will actually be usable. You’ll hit OOMs (out of memory errors) that take down the whole GUI if you turn off swap on a system with only 2GB RAM. You can only really turn off swap if you have a very large amount of RAM, and even then, it’s safer to keep it enabled and set swappiness to 0 instead.
most of these old systems dont have soldered RAM a few extra gig of DDR2 RAM would be dirt cheap on ebay too
If you can find it :) DDR2 is old enough that a lot of it has been thrown out as e-waste. If you’re lucky, you may be able to find some at a computer/electronics recycler for free.
Arch, with XFCE and the strict bare minimum. Ex : midori instead of firefox, etc. Don’t dream about CAD
If you can afford it, a SSD will significant improve your life. Also, any more memory will help.
As others said, you can disable swap.
Are you running the xfce version of Mint? It’s significantly less resources.
you can disable swap.
Be careful with disabling swap if you don’t have a very large amount of RAM, as many apps rely on memory overcommitment and a large virtual address space, which can behave erratically without swap.
You’d be better off keeping swap enabled and instead setting
vm.swappiness = 0in sysctl.conf.Swappiness is a value between 0 and 100, where 0 means to never swap unless absolutely necessary (only if you completely run out of RAM), and 100 means all programs and data will be swapped nearly instantly. Think of it like a target for the percentage of RAM to keep available. The default is usually 40 which is fine for a low-RAM system, but swaps way too often for a system with more RAM.
Thank you, I did have that wrong.
I use bunsenlabs helium on my old vaio a series laptop. I use a 32 bit non pae build bc it’s a pentium M that might not support pae. It uses a window manager over a desktop environment.
I’d recommend using a 32 bit distro as they tend to take up a little less ram.
Also I’m on a 4200 rpm PATA HDD. It has 2 gb of ddr ram. It’s slightly too old to get ddr2 which is unfortunate.
Java would like to hog the couch
Minimum requirements to run
hello worldin Java
i mean, some games (cough cough factorio cough cough) manage to use up about 25GB of ram on my system, so it’s nice to have a buffer. now, my 64GB may be considered a bit overkill but i call it future proofing
I upgraded to 64 GB a few months ago, also thinking it would be future proof for a while. However, I entirely exhuasted it two weeks ago 😑
tf are you doing
K8s clusters, probably.
some c++ and android coding on a few projects, plus firefox, plus the other minor stuff like translator, goldendict, …
My work takes 40 gig and I can still play Factorio while working :)
yeah probably because of all the mods i play with, and the the absolute overkill i manufacturer everything with
Ram disks!!
Can’t relate, just upgraded my laptop from 32GB to 64GB since VScode would keep closing due to OOM. What? Oh, no, it’s not vscode’s fault…I keep like 5 Firefox windows with 30+ tabs open, like a fucking maniac… Close them? What do you mean “close” them?
I think there’s still something wrong with your setup… You should be able to have as many Firefox windows and tabs as you’d like without using too much RAM, since they should de “suspended”.
I regularly have hundreds of tabs running fine, on 32GB of RAM.
Most likely it’s a vscode extension that’s leaking memory, and this problem will still happen after your upgrade, just take longer.
I mean, I doubt Kate or Geany or Vim would’ve closed due to OOM, but sure…
same with intellij
Firefox puts inactive tabs to sleep, effectively turning them into bookmarks that reload when you switch back to them. I regularly right-click close-tabs-to-the-right over 200 tabs.
You only need 1 tab to OOM if that tab is Jira. I’ve literally had tabs take up more than 10GB.
Only 30 tabs, you need to bump those numbers up!
I was about to reply to the same thing to another comment about 300 tabs, LOL
I had around 1500 open tabs in Firefox. It was fine. I figured enough was enough and closed them all. Now I close all tabs at the end of the day before shutting down.
What is “shutting down”?
Wait, do people shut down their computers when they’re done using them?
I know I did on the desktop PC we had at home when I was a kid… But now the desktop doubles as a homeserver (and does that more than it does gaming lately) and the laptop just goes to sleep rather than shutting it down.
I have a separate home server, so I don’t have a reason to not shut down my desktop PC. No reason for it to be using electricity while it’s doing nothing.
I shut down my laptop because suspend/sleep support on Linux still isn’t great.
When I started hitting OOMs I just downloaded free ram.
(Modifying my zram-generator config to use 1.5x my ram size instead of the measly 4GB – uncompressed – default. Seriously it’s worth looking into, though default depends on your distro)
Can’t you just add swap?
I think you can run some apps purely on swap and keep your ram for vscode only
zram is swap on ram, it works by compressing parts of the ram when you run low and it’s much faster than traditional disk-based swap.
Get sideberry, it allows you to “sleep” unused tabs
It does that by default though?
Idk, I think it’s more proactive and more customizable
No need to convince me. I will always believe people complaining about garbage electron apps.
That being said, I use vscodium myself and actually like it. Does not mean I won’t complain tho
This comment section is a goldmine
Look at all that room to get stuff done.
That’s how I got a free netbook. The netbook had 32GB flash with windows and office occupying 27+GB. Then windows wanted to do an update - with an 8+GB file. Spot the problem. And windows can get quite annoying with updates. As the netbook could not be expanded, and attempts to redirect the update to a USB stick did not work, a newer netbook was bought, and I got the old one. Linux plus libreoffice plus a bunch of extras happily sat in 4GB…
I spent years gaming on 8gb. Sure I could barely open bg3 but do I really need my 32 now?
