[sf-lug] System requirements

[Bobbie Sellers]

On 10/10/18 7:43 AM, Akkana Peck wrote:
> 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 In my experience running out-of-date machines, I've never had a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
>
     Well the distro can make a difference.  Thinking of Puppy here in 
reducing the demands
of the system then the browser will require less.  Qupzilla is very much 
smaller than Firefox
and works like Firefox did about the time I started.

     As for hardware versus software I ran Mandriva 2009.1 with KDE on a 
old Dell Inspiron
4000 with a 700 MegaHertz "Coppermine" Pentium.  Of course I reduced the 
number of
virtual desktops since it had about 8 megabyte of Video ram and only 384 
Megabytes
of total ram.

So I would say that nearly any distribution which uses a light 
(therefore fast) Desktop Environment
like XFCE would do.   I used Firefox on the Inspiron with Mandriva and 
an earlier version of KDE.

     Even Debian with XFCE if people who don't know enough to run Linux 
from a terminal (like
me) are going to be ussers in the maker space.

     Bobbie Thanks for the reply and for all the other replies to date 
from other users.