LeFantome

Arcan is a cool idea but you mostly hear about it from people complaining that Wayland is not ready. Of course, Wayland is already used by more than half of Linux users and Arcan does not really exist yet.

By the time GTK5 appears, a vanishingly small percentage of Linux users will need X11.

I run Wayland on 2009 hardware now.

As toolkits abandon X11, it is going to pressure other operating systems to move to Wayland as well.

FreeBSD is already moving. Even Haiku has Wayland support. So we are talking about the smaller BSDs and the Solaris derivatives. Or ancient operating systems on original hardware I guess. In which case, they can run the older apps which is likely all they can run anyway.

Worst, worst case, you can run Wayland on x11. If there is something you absolutely need, I guess you can run Wayland apps on x11 that way.

How so?

32 bit pointers take up half as much RAM as 64 bit pointers. A complicated application like a web browser consumes much more memory as a 64 bit app than it does as a 32 bit app. That is true of most programs but you are really going to notice it in both desktop environment and your web browser.

You would be amazed how much 32 bit helps. If you do not open too many tabs, the web should be fine. Video no problem ( at reasonable resolutions).

Q4OS with Trinity is a great pick for this user. Alpine is great but MUSL may cause problems. And I say this as a MUSL use (Chimera Linux). You are not going to find 32 but Flatpaks and Distrobox may be too complicated. So, I would stay away from MUSL based distros with 32 bit Linux on a 2 GB system.

MX and Antix are also Debian based and have 32 bit versions.

A 32 bit distro will make a BIG difference with that much RAM.

Run a 32 bit distro. It is the only thing that will run well on 2 GB of RAM. It will run better than you think.

Q4OS, Antix, MX Linux, Damn Small Linux, and even pure 32 bit Debian are decent candidates. If you use Q4, give the Trinity desktop a shot.

I like Andelie Linux as well but MUSL may cause problems for an unsophisticated user.

Yhab

There is also a release of VirtualBox that uses KVM.

Have an upvote. I use Edge on Linux every day for Outlook and Teams. I do not really use Office online to create my own docs but, if there is an attachment in an email, I use Office in the browser to view it. It all works well enough that I hardly think about it.

It used to be that Edge was the only browser that worked well for Teams. Ironically, with the latest update to Edge, my webcam stopped working. I loaded Teams in Firefox and it worked fine. There are other reports online of the same problem and Microsoft posted that they are working on a fix. So, Microsoft managed to break Teams compatibility in their own browser and it seems that Teams now works fine in Firefox. At least, it did for me.

I will not use a system with snap and has nothing to do with being proprietary.

One of the reasons that I could not use Ubuntu is that I cannot control using snap or not. They even use it to install apps that you install via apt.

The fact that the only time I did use a system with snap left me with the impression that it is an absolute performance pig certainly does not help.

I do not think it is about the royalties in most cases. I mean, RISC-V royalties may be the reason you choose it over ARM for a custom chips ( say in the bajillion SSDs you are going to ship ). Perhaps you were going to choose a different ISA for a microcontroller and the lack of license fee makes RISC-V attractive.

For chip maker, it is the freedom that matters as that is what “convenience” means to them. And it means less risk. Look at the Qualcomm / ARM lawsuits right now. That would not happen if Qualcomm had chosen ARM.

And if you are a chip maker licensing core designs, do you want your ISA to force you into a monopoly? ARM is more mature today but the role that ARM the company plays is being filled by multiple RISC-V suppliers ( HiFive, Milk-V, etc ). More players means more completion means more choice and probably better prices. ARM’s core business is licensing chip designs and they are about to have a lot of competition from RISC-C.

And in the end, competition from and within the RISC-V space will drive down prices for consumers. That is what consumers are going to care about. The lower prices will not really be because of lower license fees ( though that will help of course ). And it all comes with a large and open software ecosystem. So the “convenience” will be there too.