
Consider these memory requirements for Fedora Core 2, as specified by Red Hat:
Minimum for graphical: 192MB and
Recommended for graphical: 256MB Does that sound any alarm bells with you? 192MB minimum? I've been running Linux for five years (and am a huge supporter), and have plenty of experience with Windows, Mac OS X and others. And those numbers are shocking -- severely so. No other general-purpose OS in existence has such high requirements. Linux is
getting very fat.
>Running XP with less than 256MB of RAM is a disk-thrashing nightmare
I am running XP with 256 MB of RAM daily. That's my PRIMARY machine, a dual Celeron 533 and 256 MB RAM running XP PRO.
I run IE, OE, Winamp, Notepad and Trillian at the same time with no problems at all. Things only get a bit strictier when I need to use an IDE or PaintShopPro, but overall, 98% of the time I only use the 5 apps mentioned above, and 256 MBs are more than enough to run those. At least for my needs, it runs great at 256 MB.