[conspire] Installing Linux on Elise Scher's Chromebook

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> Meanwhile, maybe people in the group can suggest some "live" distros
> that you can put on USB and take for a test drive.   Then you can see
> if your computer has enough RAM and look at different window
> managers,  etc.

Yeppers.  Would be useful!

Towards that end, it would be handy to _know_ how much RAM.  
The various sources I found and referred to upthread suggested 
it could be either 2GB or 4GB RAM.  Either is scanty for a full-blown
desktop distro in the 2020s, especially with a 2016-era Celeron,
but 2GB is _really_ dire in that context.

Ironically, the linuxmafia.com server, BTW, is still a Pentium III with
512 kB RAM.  Though, not for much longer, finally.

To indulge a bit of old-man complaining, in the dinosaur days of the
1990s, each distro release had a "System Requirements" section in each
set of release notes, and before chancing installation you made a
beeline for that, to see if your hardware had enough grunt.  But since
some time in the early 2000s, a realistic "System Requirements" notice
has been a rara avis.

And, further irony, it's been the novice-focussed distros that lead this
charge towards harmful vagueness -- part of a general "Let's not give
much information because novices hate complexity" bit of bushwah.

On the other hand, in fairness, one of the earliest disappointments of
CABAL installfests was:  People will reliably arrive having absolutely
no idea how much RAM and disk their own computers have, or, worse, will 
think they know but be wildly mistaken.  Somewhere we still have the
simple questionaire we tried asking installfest attendees to fill out,
concerning their systems' basic parameters:  Suffice to say, it was a
spectacular failure.

Getting back to your generally fine idea:  One problem with "live"
distros is that they chew up much more RAM than does the same system
directly installed -- which is predicatable, given that they shift upon
booting to a ginormous RAMdisk, load the entire distro into RAM and some
RAMdisk and some live disk, and then offer _on top_ of all that RAM
usage an optional live-mode-based installer program, where the installer
program itself is usually graphical, thus RAM-gobbling.

Also, the live-mode operation gives the impression of the distro being
much slower than it would be if run from actual installation.

So, to sum:  Yes, "live" mode is fantastic for kicking the tires of a
distro without committing to it -- as long as you are aware that live
mode is going to artificially bog down performance and make the distro
"heavier" than it is in real life.