Operating Systems > Linux and UNIX
Could the greatest desktop environment be a free one?
Aloone_Jonez:
560MB is over half your memory gone which is a hell of a lot.
A lot depends on what divers are loaded. If I remember rightly XP Home in safe mode uses around 70MB on a 512MB system but it's as slow as hell because there's no accelerated graphics and crappy generic drivers.
XP gnerally uses around 110MB of RAM without AV or a 3rd party firewall running.
I've recently upgraded my motherboard to an Asus A8N-VM CSM which has a NVIDIA chipset with hardware firewall and it uses just under 200MB with the drivers loaded, not that it's a problem as I have 1GB of RAM.
Fedora Core 12 with XFCE running uses around 120MB of RAM when idle.
worker201:
I've never actually researched this, or collected any cold hard evidence, but it has always seemed to me that Windows XP (and possibly other OSes) scales its resource usage to system availability. Meaning that it will use 20% of RAM, whether you have 512MB or 4GB available. (Maybe not so much use, more like set aside for itself.) My one and only piece of evidence for this is that when using a fat computer (dual Xeons, for example), processor-heavy tasks are noticeably faster, but everyday OS tasks (copy, paste, drag, context menus, etc) are not. There's probably an upper limit to how much it will use.
But again, I can't confirm any of this.
Aloone_Jonez:
I haven't found that to be the case.
It's true that XP uses less memory when you have under 128MB, in my experience it doesn't use any more when you have more memory. For example, I upgraded from 256MB to 512MB and the amount of free memory seemed to stay constant. When I upgraded the motherboard, performed a repair install, it used a bit more memory (probably around 120MB and this was with 1GB of RAM) because of the different drivers and repair enabled some services I'd previously disabled. I only noticed it using more memory after I'd installed NVIDIA ForceWare (a hardware firewall), at first I thought I had a virus, then I realised what it was.
If you have other programs running, (e.g. 3rd party firewall, AV and even OpenOffice quickstarter) they probably will use more memory if you have it because it can make them faster.
worker201:
Yeah, I suppose it's difficult to figure out. So many programs run as services or agents or residents that it is a chore to even put the computer in idle. And a user with more resources is going to be less concerned about resource consumption -> allowing those residents and agents to set up shop in the system tray.
Calum:
I've got an IBM M50. XP runs on it moderately slowly (but bearably) and XFCE4 runs on it under various ubuntu systems, at about the same speed. It's pretty pathetic actually, linux has become the bloatware it promised never to become. I can't run GNOME or KDE on this, and haven't been able to for years.
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