I’ve tried to use Fedora Workstation in VM (GNOME Boxes) with only 1GiB RAM. And it is even usable and UI is responsible for GNOME and Firefox, but applications start more slowly. All those at cost of higher CPU usage. Probably it performs well because Fedora uses swap on ZRam, and it makes the system more reliable.
I’ve tried Firefox limited to 1 GB for a laugh. It’s usable. It won’t do many tabs at the same time but it’s usable.
You can actually go lower than that but you’ll start to run into limitations with YouTube videos etc.
There are also other browsers out there that are more light-weight but perhaps not as feature-full as Firefox. Giving up extensions alone reduces a lot of complexity. If you fire up the package installer on any Linux distro and search for “browser” you’ll find a ton. There aren’t many engines but there are a lot of browsers.
With cgroups, it’s a standard kernel feature. You can limit RAM, CPU, network access, lots of things. It’s used in Docker, LXC, Kubernetes and lots of container solutions.
There’s Linux dists that can only requires less than 200 MB of RAM. Absolute Linux for an example, has a minimum system requirement of 64 MB RAM. Plenty of space left for memory hungry softwares like a browser.
Did you type: lspci > /sdc1 lspci.txt exactly like this? because that would pipe the output into /sdc1. You probably want to pipe it into /your/mount/point/lspci.txt (something like that).
It’s a bit of a niche use case and may cause other issues, I’ve never done it.
The other issue is that the broadcom drivers for that wireless card are closed source, which is antithetical to debians mission to provide an entirely open system.
There are open source reverse engineered drivers (b43) and open official drivers, (brcmsmac/brcmfmac) for some older broadcom chips but only supporting up to wireless N functionality, if I remember correctly.
it appears the closed source driver package, wl, is able to provide support for one of two chipsets on the 4360 wireless card, but there is no support for the other.
If you have a phone that can provide usb tethering, you are most likely able to provide internet to your laptop that way and continue from there to install the broadcom wl driver, if it supports your chipset. The above stack exchange link and this arch wiki link should help with that. wiki.archlinux.org/title/Broadcom_wireless
systemd now is focused around image-based systems. There is a huge gap between this design and traditional distros. I hate how the linux community has nothing in between of these two polar opposite approaches.
I feel like Linux would be easier to pick up and use for a non power user starting from scratch like my mother-in-law. It’s so much easier to download programs with the package manager and settings are so much easier to navigate
And to use the computer without being bombarded by ads
Helped my SO fix Sims 4 on her W11 laptop recently; lock screen ads, start menu ads, pre-installed bloatware begging for money
I even asked how she deals with all of that and she basically said “I dunno it just does that, if you can make it stop that’d be nice ig but just get Sims to worl for now”
Needless to say I got Sims 4 to work (removing cachedir did the trick) AND uninstalled the bloatware and turned off ad-related settings
I’d honestly have proposed (if they don’t need programs that only run on windows) “we could put linux on it and that should fix these issues” and put Linux Mint or Fedora on it (better if you choose not them unless they really want to deal with all the choices, most likely they won’t wnt to tho) and just tell them the basics of how to install software and stuff.
I’d say now’s the time, by now I mean as soon as it’s appropriate.
I was once asked if I could crack a password of a windows PC in an office cause the guy who used to work there no longer remembers it and they wanted to reuse the old PC. I asked if they need to recover any data, if they used any software that would be incompatible with Linux (not like this but directly mentioning software and asked for a list of stuff they use) and then told them it would simply be easier to install Linux on the thing, not only it’s easier but since it’s an old machine running windows 7 it’s also more secure and the computer will perform well.
During the installation we found out that the computer is glorified junk, took ages to even attempt to format the disk to ext4. Still got to install Linux Mint on another one of their computers tho, big success.
I find it amazing that so many distros with volunteers manage to curate a vast software ecosystem, reasonably successfully and yet some of the largest companies on the planet, worth more than $1T each cannot manage to find the resources to do it efficiently.
Imagine firing up a cmd or ps prompt in Windows and tying in: msiexec install adobe-hipster-app and it just works.
Have you tried Chocolatey? chocolatey.org. It’s a package manager for Windows and works great, much like brew for Mac. Or, if you prefer portable installation of programs without requiring admin, try Scoop (scoop.sh). Of course, I’d rather use paru or yay on Arch, but I’m glad these options exist.
As the unfortunate owner of a same-gen MBP with the same wireless card, you’re looking at using the proprietary driver (I at least never had any luck with the open-source ones). Luckily, Debian do support those, and even have wiki page for them: wiki.debian.org/wl
Does require some extra configuration though. If you happen to have a Android phone, you should be able to use that for USB-tethering to have internet access on the device you’re installing on, will make the process a lot easier (you don’t even need a SIM in it, you can tether your wifi, that’s what I ended up doing 😅).
You should, this is a huge achievement that has been worked on for quite a while now.
You can, actually. I live in a pretty small town and it picks up my location quite well for the weather.
Even if it didn’t, one issue doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to celebrate anything, and the issue in this case isn’t even with GNOME itself, but with the provider for the Weather app (I believe it’s OpenWeather).
It doesn’t use open weather unfortunately. It uses the Norwegian Meteorology Institute and their weather prediction is poor/entirely inaccurate for much of the world. I do wish open weather was an option especially since it’s easy to get your own weather api key.
Thx but that doesn’t make it more consumer ready. If someone looks the first time into gnome and he can’t add his location he might think GNOME is bad because it can’t even handle weather.
It’s easier to create an alias to curl wttr.in/Berlin and access weather data from terminal than using the workaround
Edit: Grrrr, clickbait. This is not about their open driver but as far as I understood about exposing a more minimal driver for vGPU usage, in light of development of Nova, a Rust based nouveau successor.
@petsoi Beautifully written perspective; the KDE Activities bit of that was my favorite! Multiple workspaces on a single monitor is probably one of my most advocated features. I'm telling someone about it at least once a week, even if it's just showin em how to use the cut-down one on their windows machine.
Yup, this is huge. Wayland gaming is now a possibility. With Explicit Sync (needed for NVIDIA users) and VRR, there’s now no excuse to keep gaming in X11 in both DEs.
Yes, no VRR (by default anyway) was a mild inconvenience, but it doesn’t exactly make games unplayable. It’s not like everybody hated gaming before gsync/freesync became widespread.
For me, VRR is crucial as I play a lot of FPS games or else, I don’t feel that the mouse is the extension of my hand. That’s why I switched from Gnome to KDE.
I just play VR on Linux, don’t really have many problems with it. Only small ones like sometimes SteamVR doesn’t recognize my headset the first time I start it so I need to restart it once.
Yeah I have an Oculus Rift S and the hardware support is pretty bad and I haven’t really gotten it to work. Obviously a vendor issue, and i don’t see meta open sourcing or releasing any drivers for linux anytime soon.
Yeah, I have a Valve Index, which is officialy supported on Linux, so I don’t have any issues in that regard. I think the only headsets that work well on Linux are the two with official support (HTC Vive and Valve Index) and the Quest headsets because of ALVR.
For some reason, on Linux, the GPU performance mode isn’t set to high automatically. You can use CoreCTRL to manually set it to high. That eliminated those issues for me.
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