Quick follow-up for anybody curious. I did install Lxqt on 32 bit Q4OS. It uses about 60 MB more than Trinity.
As a desktop, I think I like Trinity better ( Trinity is essentially KDE 3 ). Some of the lxqt companion utilities were nicer though ( I liked lxqt-terminal more than Trinity Konsole for example ). Of course, you can install and use the tools with either desktop.
If you only have 1 GB of RAM, you definitely need to use a 32 bit distro. Regardless of the WM or DE, 64 bit software is going to chew through that 1 GB fast.
I have been playing around with the Q4OS Trinity 32 bit and I had forgotten how much lighter 32 bit software is memory-wise. I have a full DE ( Trinity ), Firefox with a couple tabs, Thunar, LibreOffice Calc, GIMP, and Scribus all open and I am still only using 935 MB. Awesome.
It is certainly the lightest systemd based distro I have used.
There is definitely some software missing from the repos. I could not find dotnet or Visual Studio Code which I am sure are in 64 bit Debian. But Nala, Neovim, GCC, Clang, Rust, Go, and friends are all still there. Libmobiledevice connects to my iPhone just fine.
It even has Podman and Distrobox although none of the 64 bit images work of course.
Lxqt is in the Q4OS 32 bit distros. You could try that if you want but Trinity seems fine.
No GUI I assume
I just installed this myself ( Trinity Desktop 32 bit ). What a weird and wonderful mix of old and new.
Running htop in konsole after install reported 245 MB of memory used. So, less than 256 MB confirmed.
I am not familiar with Q4OS but I notice that it is available with both KDE Plasma and Trinity as well as in 32 bit and 64 bit additions.
The lightest weight version is most likely Trinity 32 bit. Is that what you were testing?
I may try it myself at some point. Looks interesting.
This “skills issue” thing just sounds so stupid in my ears. I am sick of reading it.
So, I am choosing a language that I hope will ensure fast, secure, and sophisticated code for my project. It has to do this for code I write, my team writes, and all future maintainers and contributors will write as well. If I choose a language that makes it easy to write unstable, fragile, and insecure code then “the skills issue” applies more to my lack of capability as an architect than it does the coders that come after me.
Stop saying, “well ya, it is super easy to make these mistakes in this language but that would never happen if you are as awesome as I am” and thinking that sounds like an intelligent argument for your language choice. There are better options. Consider them.
Why does every mention of Rust have to spawn these comments?
The story right after this one for me is how KeepassXC is porting to Qt6. I bet nobody has knee-jerk responded to that story bitching about the fact that they mentioned Qt. It is just the anti-Rust zealots that do this.
This article talks about the problems they were trying to solve, the tools they chose, and how those tools solve those problems. What is wrong with that?
Are you offering up informed commentary countering why you would have made different choices and why?
You do not need to attack every mention of a technology just because it threatens your historical preferences.
I find Arch based distros have pretty solid hardware coverage. Lots of older hardware support baked in, plus newer kernels ( newer drivers ), and up-to-date device firmware.
The older the kernel, the less hardware is supported ( generally ). That is going to be a big reason for the disparity between distros. But device firmware makes a difference, especially for distros that do not support non-free binaries. Debian has gotten a lot better since they changed that policy for example.
The more desktop centric a distro is, the more likely they are to bundle a broad selection of hardware drivers.
EOS is definitely Arch. There are only a handful of EOS packages. 99.9% of the packages ( including the kernel ) are from the real Arch repos.
I just installed Red Hat 5.2 a couple of days ago ( true story ). It is so light-weight with its Fvwm window manager, bash 1.2, and GCC 2.7.2. It even had Netscape Navigator! Who could ask for more? Anything more is bloat!
Just kidding. Bloat is installing things you do not use or that do not make your system better. I think some desktop environments add bloat. Mostly though, even the heavy ones represent a smaller fraction of system resources than their ancestors did on older systems.
If you have 3000 packages you use, who cares? However, if you have 3000 packages and only use a dozen of them, maybe your system is bloated.
I use a lot of older hardware. So, I like a fairly lean base system. I still use a lot of software though. I don’t think that is bloat.
Alpine has enters the chat
This has long been the best advice. However, just in case you are not aware, some pretty important NVIDIA changes are expected to drop in the next 2 months. It will take a while to work into every distribution but NVIDIA should finally work as well as AMD.