[sf-lug] System requirements (was: A short and simple survey)

[Akkana Peck]

Rick Moen writes:
> it was absolutely routine for _every_ distro to prominently disclose, for 
> each release, 'mimimum system requirements' (the feeblest and tiniest 
> target computer the release's installer could handle) and 'recommended
> system requirements' -- citing most importantly the CPU, total RAM, and 
> disk space for a typical (or default) installation.
> 
> But then, without any apparent discussion, most distros started making
> that information more and more obscure, or omitted altogether.

Admittedly, it must be hard to come up with numbers for that.
Does it reflect the minimum system that can run the system at all?
That can run the system with X and a lightweight window manager?
That can run Gnome or KDE reasonably? That can run a modern browser?

In my experience running out-of-date machines, I've never had a
problem running the base Linux OS, or X, or a window manager like
openbox or icewm, on any old, slow machine. I've only hit problems
when I run Firefox, or other big apps like LibreOffice. (Or a big
desktop, but I generally don't do that.) So the minimum system is
really a question of the minimum system for the versions of big
software included with the OS.

Is it possible that distros have stopped listing minimum
requirements because the big projects -- Firefox, LibreOffice,
Gnome, KDE -- don't list those requirements any more?

In answer to the original survey: I still run one Atom netbook
(so it has to run a 32-bit OS); it's attached to a stereo system
and doesn't get either booted or updated much, and is running some
old unsupported version of Debian. It has 2G RAM. The local
makerspace also has a couple of Atom netbooks on which I want to
install Debian sometime soon; I'd guess they have 1G or 2G RAM.
I'm not very interested in exploring other distros for these machines,
since the browser will be the biggest performance problem on these
machines and I don't see how a different distro can solve that.

        ...Akkana