Salix OS

There has been some talk lately about memory consumption, xfce and alternative WMs with respect to older systems. Well, I happen to have an Asus eeePC 901, from around 2008, with an Atom CPU and 1 GB RAM, in which I have installed Salix 15.0.

Here are a couple of screenshots. First one is after xfce has been started and started a terminal:


after which I opened thunar, viewed the screenshot with ristretto, started htop and took another screenshot:


NetworkManager is running for the Wifi connection, the Xfce power manager is also running as well as the pulseaudio plugin.

Not too bad, right?

I have to note that when started in init 3, without loading X, I get this after booting: edit: I updated the 1st screenshot to show the output of df too

Not bad at all. In fact it shows a surprisingly low memory footprint for Xfce. The numbers I see in the screenshots are Openbox tier. I never saw Xfce running with htop reporting less than 350 Mb of RAM used, and typically 400-420 Mb without other applications running. Did you modify the services running by default, and if so, how?

And I am running it very satisfactorily on my mum's old Dell, which is at least ten years old and used to take about a quarter of an hour to boot Windows Seven. I don't have access to that machine at the moment, but I think it packs a bit more of a punch than the Asus!

I also had Slackel on it for a bit when mum was still going to keep it, and it was pretty zippy too! She was very appreciative of the cross penguin. @djemos

mimosa wrote: ↑15. Sep 2022, 12:54She was very appreciative of the cross penguin. @djemos

I'm old-fashioned and changed the penguin with the green wheat field Slackel had as the default wallpaper before the penguin with the light sword.

Here's another one after I opened up netsurf to this thread and ran "service list" to show the list of services. I really didn't change much other than the most obvious. I ran free on the second terminal after that. In fact I'm posting from the eeepc right now.



The system feels surprisingly responsive overall.

I would say great!
Me with Fluxbox, xfce4-power-manger, volumeicon, nm-applet, I get to 260Mb, in an old Lenovo laptop...

Great results! Especially, since many distributions quit supporting 32-bit processors. And the 32-bit-only Intel Atom is still in use in Netbooks of around 2007-2009.

Impressive results gapan! It is a case of say don't change your computer but change your operating system!

This is my old acer laptop from 2008 running Salix Live Xfce 15.0 BETA2...

hugok wrote: ↑16. Sep 2022, 12:46 Impressive results gapan! It is a case of say don't change your computer but change your operating system!

There is absolutely no reason to throw away an old computer, or let it collecting dust in the attic. I am using such computers with Salix and Slackel for several tasks. In fact, I was recently away of home and had such a Netbook with me, with just 1 Gb of RAM - and it worked just fine (there are a few tricks to make it working better for memory-devouring tasks such as watching videos, but that's a topic for another thread.). Your oldie is actually much better than mine, because I see it has 3 Gb of RAM. What's strange, though, is that yours is reporting a memory footprint for Xfce of 383 Mb, which is a normal number, similar to what I get (and actually near the absolute minimum I've ever seen for Xfce.)

However gapan reported a very different number. I think 180 Mb of memory usage with Xfce running is just impossible. I will have an eeePC soon and investigate further, but I honestly think we re just measuring memory usage differently.

My laptop had 2 GB of RAM but I added another 1GB of RAM. As for the value of memory in use, it should be noted that it is a live system! When installed in real hardware, Salix 15.0 consumes less RAM. In the same machine, Slackel Openbox 7.5 consumes slightly more RAM...