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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I agree in general with this article, but it's a bit overblown. Why not just say "no real desktop OS runs the latest apps without at least 256 mb RAM" and be done with it? Some perspectives:
- I recently watched the latest Knoppix fail to even start KDE on a new 2.4 gHz Dell Dimension with 128 mb RAM (since with Knoppix there's no swap). That's annoying.
- XP or OS X *will* run on 128 RAM ... but they churn horribly because they're dependent on swap/virtual memory in that case too. For our clients (nearly all Windows shops) we insist on 512 mb minimum for all new XP desktops. We've been doing this for at least the last year. The increased productivity is more than worth the measly $50 in RAM!
- I run the latest Suse 9.1 quite comfortably on a Pentium II 400 mHz with 384 mb RAM. The same machine ran Win2K quite snappily as well. But take away the RAM and it probably wouldn't boot KDE either.
- And we run dev servers on the latest Mandrake and Trustix distributions ... running LAMP + Samba + Postfix + a few others only requires about 90-100 megs of RAM, leaving plenty of room on a 128 mb machine for multiple httpd processes and a PHP bytecode shared memory cache like mmcache or php accelerator. These are Pentium-class machines and they respond nicely ... let's see Windows Server 2003 even try to boot on one of those!
Are Gnome and KDE bloated? Well, haven't they always been? And consider that most of the big distros like Suse are basically running them both all the time, because most people want both KDE and GTK apps ... and they're separate from the window server, which is separate from the kernel and so on. All of which are cross-platform code. Compare that to XP or a hobby OS like BeOS or SkyOS which vertically integrates all those components and is written for a specific chip architecture (x86 only) and of course a Linux desktop is going to be more bloated.
But if I can run the latest desktop distro on a 6-year-old Pentium II with 384 mb RAM, who cares?