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"le9" Strives To Make Linux Very Usable On Systems With Small Amounts Of RAM

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  • #21
    A note on running that Firefox with 37 tabs on 2 GB RAM:


    There's a video demonstration, as well as ready-to-use LiveCD with le9 patch.

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    • #22
      Originally posted by bple2137 View Post
      It's good to hear! I think that amount of memory we use today is absurd. I got a new machine in my job recently and I was like... why would I need 32GB of RAM for Vim, web browser and maybe few VMs?
      I saw a sticker with Windows logo on the bottom - oh, I get it

      Anyway it's always good to utilize old hardware until it works.
      I get the joke, but it's not Windows (alone) that's the culprit. Linux is just about unbearable with just 4GB running Firefox + <pick your WM> as well. You're practically running two OSes on top of each other as soon as you start up a web browser. Many programs today don't bother to watch their memory use. Hell even back in the 90s my boss regularly said with utter seriousness (paraphrased) We don't need to bother with RAM conservation because it's not a limiting commodity. That was back in the days when 32 MB was scarce on Big Iron machines. Now it's beyond ridiculous. 8GB has become a bare minimum no matter what OS you use because so many necessary programs run in a browser and you may not even realize it. The programs just start up their own customized browser. You may end up with 5 different versions of the same (Chromium) browser at the same time - for single programs! Newer programmers may not even be able to write native programs because they're so dependent on browser technologies like JavaScript and Electron. This is the case for any OS - Windows, MacOS, Linux, w/e.

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      • #23
        I wrote a note on running Linux on old PC, the PC with 37 Firefox tabs from the news is mine. The configuration is:
        • 2 core 64 bit CPU: Intel® Coreâ„¢2 Duo E4600 (2 cores, 2.4 GHz, late 2007)
        • 2 GB of RAM (DDR2 667 MHz, single module)
        • 160 GB Hard Disk: Samsung HD161HJ (SATA II, June 2007):
        • No discrete graphics card
        le9 patch makes this PC from "barely usable" to "I can't believe what can it do now!".

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        • #24
          Originally posted by HyperDrive View Post
          I fail to see how this hack is better than setting swappiness to 200 (which biases reclaim heavily towards swap instead of page cache eviction), page-cluster to 0 (no read-ahead), and using zram with zstd compression.
          "There are people who suggest to tune vm.swappiness option. Indeed, you can set it to 200 to give full priority to swapping anonymous pages instead of dropping file cache, but it's not that precise and does not keep enough amount of file cache in near-full RAM cases. It makes things better a bit overall, and is definitely a good choice for SSD, but on HDD it doesn't help that much." https://github.com/hakavlad/le9-patc...ment-880058858

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          • #25
            Linux for PC from 2007

            This article describes the installation and configuration process of a modern Linux-based operating system for a weak computer from 2007...

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            • #26
              Originally posted by HyperDrive View Post
              So you hit a VM corner case which manifests itself when there's no swap. I use swap on zram on all of my systems (no swap to rust/SSD, ever, even on machines with less than 2 GiB or RAM) and I've never, ever, seen the issue you describe in that email (I've seen oom kills, but hey, resources aren't infinite). To me, the solution is obvious: enable swap. No need to hack the kernel until a proper solution is found.
              "swap on zram + le9" is much better than "swap on zram". Look at https://github.com/hakavlad/le9-patc...ment-877706577 and compare Case 3 and Case 4.

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              • #27
                Originally posted by ezst036 View Post

                There are corporations out there in their 2-3 year refresh cycles beginning to throw computers out to e-waste with 16-32 GB of memory in them.
                Yep. Its great. Because of this, I haven't had to personally buy a new computer for almost 20 years. Not to mention the 2-3 mark is the sweet spot in terms of compatibility for running open-source operating systems.

                So in many ways I don't want this wasteful behavior to change. And I am also fairly certain it never will.

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                • #28
                  Originally posted by hakavlad View Post
                  le9 maintainer here, ask any questions.
                  PC Load Letter? What the fuck does that mean?



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                  • #29
                    So is it already integrated in xanmod kernels ?

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                    • #30
                      hakavlad , so if I install it via this AUR on my system do I need to do any further configuration? Planning to use it on an 8GB laptop.

                      i.e. have the XanMod team set the sysctl knobs to sensible values?

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