I recently found out about a Linux Distro named Q4OS and I wanted to test out their claim that it only requires 256 MB of ram when using the trinity desktop environment. However, when I used the live cd in virt-manager with 256 MB or ram, it just kernel panicked at boot. So I then tried it with 512 MB of ram. In addition to some issues that are not present when you are using at least 1 GB of ram, such as “sudo apt update” causing the entire VM to become unresponsive, I noticed that it seemed to actually use anywhere between 290 MB to 370 MB of ram when the only thing running was the process viewer (which is htop).

Obviously, this is still very low for a modern Linux distro but I was wondering how accurate VMs are for testing ram usage.

And, yes I know that it would be pretty much useless on a PC that only had 256 MB of ram even if it did work. I’m actually checking the ram usage because there is a possibility that I may be using a very old computer of mine that only has 1 GB of ram at some point in the future. So I’m just testing it and eventually other distros out to to see which one I’m going to end up using (assuming I do actually end up even using that computer).

Edit: I just tried the 32-bit version in virt-manager and htop stated it was only using 232 MB of ram, which means that their claim was right and that I might have been using the wrong version.

Edit 2: I just tried installing the 64-bit version in virt-manager and htop stated that it was using about 350 MB of ram, so I don’t know if installing it actually made a difference.

  • @[email protected]OP
    1•7 months ago

    I’ve been looking into lightweight Linux distros on and off for a while now, so I have heard of LXQt. The only problem is that I have no experience with installing a desktop environment, so if there is a distro that can use it and it would use less ram than the 32-bit version of Q4OS (which is already less than 256 MB), I’d want a distro that has it preinstalled.

    It would be easy if there was a list/database that contained a sort-able list of how much ram every distro used. But I’ve never found one, the closest was a list of lightweight distros on Wikipedia but that list is very outdated and is also missing a lot of distros.

      • @[email protected]OP
        1•7 months ago

        I’m not familiar with Fedora, as I’ve only ever used Debian and Debian derivatives. I also can’t seem to find any information on the system requirements for the LXQt spin of Fedora. I may still check it out in the future because I don’t know if I will always stick with the Xfce edition of Linux Mint for my main computer, but right now I’m just looking for a Linux distro for my old computer and Q4OS seems to be fine.

        • @[email protected]
          1•7 months ago

          All these distros are very similar. You just use dnf instead of apt, thats its. And repos get synced automatically.

          If you really really want to stay on the apt side (I wouldnt), you can use the OG Lubuntu, which was a driving force in LXDE and LXQt development. But you will want to run unsnap to remove the bloat and make it as small as possible.

          LXQt uses less RAM than XFCE and it is now fully based on Qt6. XFCE is based on XOrg which is not maintained since forever. LXQt is really close to being Wayland ready, which is also faster and more efficient than XOrg’s spaghetti code.

          But as Ubuntu progresses too slow to get the latest cool stuff, I would recommend Fedora. It really is nice.

          • @[email protected]OP
            1•7 months ago

            The main reason I’m currently staying with Linux Mint is because it’s what I have installed and it works for me. I may switch to a different distro in the future but right now, I have no reason to. I’d also have concerns about software availability, which from what I’ve seen, Debian (and I think Arch to some extent) currently has the most software available.

            Also, Xfce is currently in the process of adding support for Wayland. They have stated in their roadmap that they want full support for Wayland in version 4.20 and they are working on porting everything and making sure that everything works. You can read about their current progress here: https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap

            • @[email protected]
              1•7 months ago

              Yes certainly reinstalling and software availability are a thing.

              You can check packages.fedoraproject.org and copr.fedorainfracloud.org for packages. COPR is like the AUR.

              Interesting thanks for the link. Strangely it doesnt work when I am german, but searching for it I get the same one.

              I recommend the Episode “Super PCMan” by Linux User Space. It is pretty interesting, and LXQt has a smaller footprint and runs on the latest framework.

              I see that they kind of some time plan the GTK4 ports, but LXQt is already on the latest Qt. I dont know how well supported GTK3 is really, but I guess it is okay?