Linked by Bob Marr on Thu 10th Jun 2004 05:48 UTC
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.
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Linux is a kernel. It runs on machines with 2MB of RAM quite well, depending on kernel version.
GNU/Linux is an OS. It runs on anything from an embedded system with 2MB of RAM to an IBM 390 with GBs of core.
This post is a troll...
Uh, no, Andrew/Mark. You're barking up the wrong tree. If you exclude the Linux kernel from what's "fat", then you also have to exclude the Windows XP kernel. It's pretty small, too.
The things that make an OS fat are the things that users interact with most commonly: Shells, apps, etc. Not the kernel. But, regardless of how you want to characterize "Linux", it is judged by what's included by default when you setup a distribution. People don't install Linux and say, "Wow, I really like the speed of the kernel -- but KDE really blows chunks perf-wise." They blame the entire stack because (a) most don't know what a kernel is, (b) even if they did, they don't have visibility into the kernel to differentiate between bloat there and the apps.