I have a laptop with 4 GB of RAM that I’d like to use for occasional comic book reading. (It’s a touch screen 2-in-1 laptop that folds over into a tablet configuration.) I use Bazzite on my main PC and I love how low maintenance it is. Are there any immutable/atomic distros that featue XFCE, LXDE, or some other low RAM friendly desktop? Or, should I just layer XFCE or LXDE on top of UBlue Core or make my own image or something? Thanks!

  • Kwozyman
    5·
    1 day ago

    Why do you think immutable distros use more memory?

    • just_another_person
      92·
      1 day ago

      Change management on a layered FS, containers everywhere…etc.

      Depending on what you’re doing, it can make a big difference. Especially when you’re talking about a 4GB machine with little to no margin of extra working space. Updates will certainly be problematic.

      • Kwozyman
        4·
        1 day ago

        I think updates depend on the system itself, I can only speak about the one I know, bootc and it has no additional overhead in comparison to a regular rpm system. In fact, all that it does in the background is run dnf/rpm in a container and then simply dump that container in a separate partition. Nothing memory heavy happening there.

        As for running containers, the memory overhead is negligible, at the order of a couple of megabytes per container at most.

        The only strained resource on a immutsble system is arguably disk space, but usually that is mitigated by deduplication.

        • just_another_person
          32·
          1 day ago

          Yes, but as I said, on a 4GB budget, this matters quite a bit. I run thousands of edge devices on a custom distro with similar constraints, and it adds up quickly. It’s not that it’s insurmountable or anything, but I’m answering the question asked and not getting into the particulars. It’s just a known fact.

          • dgdftEnglish
            2·
            1 day ago

            FWIW I switched over to Nix recently, and discovered that deploying builds over SSH is a first-class feature.

            I wired up remote build pushes from my workstation to my underpowered VPS + antique thinkpad, and it’s been 100% painless. You can definitely make immutable work on <1 GB memory without much fuss if you’re not locked into a single-device model.