this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
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Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Did you not read the part of my post where I mentioned that I was planning on running this on an old computer that only has 1 GB of ram?
If you only have 1 GB of RAM, you definitely need to use a 32 bit distro. Regardless of the WM or DE, 64 bit software is going to chew through that 1 GB fast.
I have been playing around with the Q4OS Trinity 32 bit and I had forgotten how much lighter 32 bit software is memory-wise. I have a full DE ( Trinity ), Firefox with a couple tabs, Thunar, LibreOffice Calc, GIMP, and Scribus all open and I am still only using 935 MB. Awesome.
It is certainly the lightest systemd based distro I have used.
There is definitely some software missing from the repos. I could not find dotnet or Visual Studio Code which I am sure are in 64 bit Debian. But Nala, Neovim, GCC, Clang, Rust, Go, and friends are all still there. Libmobiledevice connects to my iPhone just fine.
It even has Podman and Distrobox although none of the 64 bit images work of course.
Lxqt is in the Q4OS 32 bit distros. You could try that if you want but Trinity seems fine.
Quick follow-up for anybody curious. I did install Lxqt on 32 bit Q4OS. It uses about 60 MB more than Trinity.
As a desktop, I think I like Trinity better ( Trinity is essentially KDE 3 ). Some of the lxqt companion utilities were nicer though ( I liked lxqt-terminal more than Trinity Konsole for example ). Of course, you can install and use the tools with either desktop.
Sorry.
Note that many modern Desktops may only use as much RAM if they have as much.
Anyways, use LXQt, it is based on Qt6 now, will have Wayland support soon, and can be used with Wayfire or even tiling window managers, maybe even the one from COSMIC!
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.
https://fedoraproject.org/spins/lxqt/
I dont think it uses below 256MB but lets see? It is a moder desktop and soon with LXQt 6.1 you can install Wayfire, Kwin or other compositors and should be able to just select the different compositor in the login menu, and have Wayland.
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.
All these distros are very similar. You just use
dnfinstead 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.
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
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?