How many arch users are on older hardware?

Kenetixx · 2006-11-20 14:28:10

In older i mean around the p4 2gig era no HT.
As i see alot of arch users using light WM and light and fast apps, so i figure alot of users must be on older hardware, thus the need for less resource intense programs.
I my self have just purchased a new Intel Core DUO 6800 and 4 gig of DDR2 ram along with 2 x 400 gig SATA2 hdd and using my trusty 7900gt Graphics card.
So im thinking i can use any linux based WM desktop with out fear of losing performance. SO far i have tried OB3 and KDE 3.5 and to be honest there is no diff with speed that i can see or feel.
SO are there alot of older hardware PCs amongst the arch community?

Kenetixx · 2006-11-20 14:31:56

That said i have tried OSX 10.8 and Vista on this machine both installs lasted 30 minutes before i was over it. They both run like a dog on my Hardware
Hurrrray for Linux

lessthanjake · 2006-11-20 15:23:08

I think most people are using openbox, fvwm and so on, because the consider them the best tool available. Dont think the major motivation si speed. But I'm only guessing (using Gnome )

filoktetes · 2006-11-20 16:29:29

I think lessthanjake is quite right. I've used both Gnome and KDE on a 900Mhz Duron (ok, it's got 512Mb RAM), without feeling it's too slow. I don't think there are any programs in the repos that can't run fine on such a system.
I think think a lot of people just don't like the idea of having the additional complexity and needless clutter provided by DEs like KDE and Gnome, and choose the simpler variants, more suited to their needs, not necessaraly more suited to their hardware.

tomk · 2006-11-20 20:31:22

satanix wrote:

In older i mean around the p4 2gig era no HT.

If that's older, I'm wondering how you would describe my highest spec machine, a PIII 650MHz with 384MB RAM - antique? museum piece? Please feel free to add your own .

Oh, and I use xfce, with some gnome under the hood - does the job fine.

xterminus · 2006-11-21 00:05:51

satanix wrote:

In older i mean around the p4 2gig era no HT.
As i see alot of arch users using light WM and light and fast apps, so i figure alot of users must be on older hardware, thus the need for less resource intense programs.

My workstation is an athlonxp, with a gig of ram. (Not too old). I can easily run gnome and kde. However, it bothered me that after simply booting up my box and autostarting common apps like gaim/firefox, I had over 700 megs of ram already in use. By eliminating gnome/nautilus, I was able to drop that to about 500 megs. (Which leaves me with lots of room to play with). A kde desktop approached 800 megs (probably because my most used apps are gtk based, so all the gtk+qt stuff was being loaded).

There are other considerations too.

An OS is a stack of metaphors and abstractions that stands between you and the guts of your PC, and embodying various tricks the programmer used to convert the information you're working with – be it images, e-mail messages, movies, or word processing documents – into the bytes that are the only things computers know how to work with. When we use the command line to work with our computers, we were very close to the bottom of that stack. When we use most modern DE's, our interaction with the machine is heavily mediated. Everything we do is interpreted and translated time and again as it works its way down through all of the metaphors and abstractions.

I find that icons and fancy eye candy often adds yet another layer of metaphor that adds confusion rather than simplifies common tasks.

By using fancy GUIs all the time we have insensibly bought into a premise that few people would have accepted if it were presented to them bluntly: namely, that hard things can be made easy, and complicated things simple, by putting the right interface on them.

And finally, I tend to work in an xterm of some sort 90% of the time. OpenBox and other similar WM's get "out of the way" and do not provide all the distractions, popups/notifications that DE's do. Which is probably why I prefer OB more than any reason listed above.

Kenetixx · 2006-11-21 03:46:23

excellent replys
I was just curious as to why ppl use light window managers. I myslef like OB3 aswell and use it for the most part because of the customization it has. It looks like som ppl still have older hardware which is cool, i just buy newer because i can really not because i need it..
xterminus you must have alot of things open to have that much ram used, i am only using 360 meg atm with kde and firefox open and a few terms, and with eyecandy on full.

allucid · 2006-11-21 04:41:24

I am on a 1.4 Gig Pentium M and a 2 Gig P4. I use openbox because Gnome/KDE/etc. get in the way.

battra · 2006-11-21 05:26:34

PII 450 MHz with 256 MB of RAM using fluxbox (and Arch obviously). I initially tried fluxbox and other lightweight apps out of necessity. But, I now use the exact same setup (i.e. fluxbox, etc..) on newer and more powerful machines because fluxbox and other lightweight apps are great for many reasons.

filoktetes · 2006-11-21 11:59:53

xterminus wrote:

However, it bothered me that after simply booting up my box and autostarting common apps like gaim/firefox, I had over 700 megs of ram already in use. By eliminating gnome/nautilus, I was able to drop that to about 500 megs. (Which leaves me with lots of room to play with). A kde desktop approached 800 megs (probably because my most used apps are gtk based, so all the gtk+qt stuff was being loaded).

There's no problem running KDE, Firefox, Gaim and whatever other gtk program at the same time on a 128Mb machine, even a 64Mb can do it fairly well. I suppose you get tricked by how Linux handles memory. If you're using the free command, it usually gives a very misleading picture of the memory use, since Linux, when it can, often claims a lot of memory that it doesn't use. I'm not sure how it actually works, but I'm sure that the impression of memory use you get from 'free' isn't right.

manmower · 2006-11-21 12:11:16

xterminus makes some excellent points about the abstraction layers. This is one of the reasons I like Arch so much, the feeling of being in control at a low level when needed.

That being said, I do in fact use KDE on a P3 800MHz with 192 MB of RAM and the ck kernel. The speed is quite nice, more or less the same as Windows XP on the same machine, and more than usable enough for me.

xterminus · 2006-11-21 13:33:37

satanix wrote:

excellent replys
I was just curious as to why ppl use light window managers. I myslef like OB3 aswell and use it for the most part because of the customization it has. It looks like som ppl still have older hardware which is cool, i just buy newer because i can really not because i need it..
xterminus you must have alot of things open to have that much ram used, i am only using 360 meg atm with kde and firefox open and a few terms, and with eyecandy on full.

Not a lot of eyecandy, but a ton of services I use locally for development work. Apache (2 instances, one in arch, 1 in a debian chroot), mysql, postgres, syslog, ntpd, samba, bitlbee, etc.

X apps that get autoloaded include: iceweasel, about 10 urxvt's ( a few of which are screen sessions which spawn other shells or programs like mutt/irssi), pypanel, openbox, devilspie, gnome-settings-daemon, mpd, gmpc, etc.

I basicly like to login into a working X environment.

And X and it's related apps usually only eat about 200 megs of ram. If I'm feeling really lightweight, I'll kill iceweasel and use epiphany which will save a good 50 megs of ram. The rest are shells and services. With gnome, X ram usage DOUBLES. Which is nutso.

xterminus · 2006-11-21 13:35:54

filoktetes wrote:

There's no problem running KDE, Firefox, Gaim and whatever other gtk program at the same time on a 128Mb machine, even a 64Mb can do it fairly well. I suppose you get tricked by how Linux handles memory. If you're using the free command, it usually gives a very misleading picture of the memory use, since Linux, when it can, often claims a lot of memory that it doesn't use. I'm not sure how it actually works, but I'm sure that the impression of memory use you get from 'free' isn't right.

I use vmstat. It's the only tool I know of that reports ram usage correctly (and the syntax is the same on other platforms like solaris).

augustob · 2006-11-22 02:03:11

xterminus wrote:

X apps that get autoloaded include: ... gnome-settings-daemon, ...

I have a similar setup to yours, so I got curious: what do you use gnome-settings-daemon for?

xterminus · 2006-11-23 12:48:01

augustob wrote:

xterminus wrote:
X apps that get autoloaded include: ... gnome-settings-daemon, ...
I have a similar setup to yours, so I got curious: what do you use gnome-settings-daemon for?

Font management mostly, but I also like gnome to control gtk/icon theming. On the rare ocassion that I pop a new USB device into the PC, gnome seems to a good job of automounting and popping up the appropriate software to handle the usb device as well.

Kenetixx · 2006-11-24 13:19:05

Just tried al lwm available in repos and i always come back to Openbox

Just got my self a p3 laptop 700mhz with 128 meg of ram to mess with the WMs on some older Hardware to compare

patroclo7 · 2006-11-24 22:08:04

I use ratpoison on all my hardware (included the intel centrino duo), since it frees me from stupid decorations and from the silly temptation to drag windows around on the screen without any reason.

zaqrack · 2007-02-07 15:06:57

I have a Celeron 700 running at 876mhz, with 512 ram. I'm completely satisfied with the speed, have tried and ran for a while fluxbox, kde, gnome, everything was fine, but now I'm stuck to xfce. Even beryl runs fine if I'm in 'fancy' mood.
My brother and his 550mhz pIII is also running arch. He converted because it runs faster than windows.

I simply see no reason to upgrade this computer, especially not to a new one. OO is sometimes a bit slow, but I can live with it.

tt3346 · 2007-02-08 12:36:44

I'm running Gnome with 1GB RAM and it usually use up less than 150MB. When you say your system was using 700MB RAM, was the cached and buffered memory counted as well? For system with 128MB RAM only, running Gnome or KDE should be quite painful. All you can do is to start your system, and may be open an MP3 file. What if you want to run NetBeans, well...

I'm going to install Arch Linux on a Sony Laptop with Celeron 466Mhz, 64MB RAM (128 if I'm lucky). I think I should try FluxBox or OpenBox. Of the two, which do you guys suggest?

JimboP · 2007-02-08 14:26:04

To see what some Arch users use - Archstats

http://www.archlinux.org/~simo/archstats/

damjan · 2007-02-08 14:41:05

A piii 650Mhz laptopt with 256MB ram ... It's pretty ok for web surfing ... If I hae Firefox and OpenOffice started it swaps a bit ... but it's still usable.
I also use KDE.

hugin · 2007-02-08 17:32:51

I ran sawfish on a Athlon 1ghz with 128 megs of ram. Sawfish is the coolest because it fast, and has devilspie built in. (^__^). Sawfish FTW! The only reason I stopped using it on my "modern" machines is that with KDE, I can get the system tray where I want the damn thing. (basically floating icons in the bottom right corner. with no taskbar) No other trays or anything get it done right. and for some weird ass reason, kicker doesn't do transperency well, unless you use KDE to set the background.

But as someone said on here (prob iph or phrak), Ram is meant to be used, not to be conserved. So since I'm not short on ram (i'm using like 250 of 768), even while running eclipse and azureus , it doesn't bother me; unless of course I'm on that 128m machine.

/swogs

zeus · 2007-02-08 18:04:24

on PIII 533/384 runs perfect for LAMP

iBertus · 2007-02-08 18:08:53

I'm using both FVWM and GNOME together in perfect harmony. It works just fine here. System specs are in the sig, as you can see, I'm not running a fossil but also not a vista-ready(tm) system.

Sophotect · 2007-04-09 15:27:06

I'm on an old HP Vectra which has an PentiumIII@933MHz, 384 MB Ram, trashy old Nvidia TNT2 M64 instead of the onboard VGA (which isn't that much better btw.), old Hauppauge WinTV, some LG cdwriter and an old Samsung 120 GB pata disk. All running well with kdemod.

Arch Linux

#1 2006-11-20 14:28:10

How many arch users are on older hardware?

#2 2006-11-20 14:31:56

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#3 2006-11-20 15:23:08

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#4 2006-11-20 16:29:29

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#5 2006-11-20 20:31:22

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#6 2006-11-21 00:05:51

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#7 2006-11-21 03:46:23

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#8 2006-11-21 04:41:24

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#9 2006-11-21 05:26:34

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#10 2006-11-21 11:59:53

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#11 2006-11-21 12:11:16

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#12 2006-11-21 13:33:37

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#13 2006-11-21 13:35:54

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#14 2006-11-22 02:03:11

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#15 2006-11-23 12:48:01

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#16 2006-11-24 13:19:05

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#17 2006-11-24 22:08:04

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#18 2007-02-07 15:06:57

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#19 2007-02-08 12:36:44

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#20 2007-02-08 14:26:04

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#21 2007-02-08 14:41:05

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#22 2007-02-08 17:32:51

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#23 2007-02-08 18:04:24

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#24 2007-02-08 18:08:53

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

#25 2007-04-09 15:27:06

Re: How many arch users are on older hardware?

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