Comments on: It’s the fat that makes you look fat

By: RIP, Dapper Drake « Motho ke motho ka botho

RIP, Dapper Drake « Motho ke motho ka botho — Tue, 03 May 2011 09:17:14 +0000

[...] recently I’ve mentioned that Dapper had its mind in the right place though. At a time when function was premier, Dapper had already started collating things that [...]

By: Old hardware a handicap? Au contraire! « Motho ke motho ka botho

Old hardware a handicap? Au contraire! « Motho ke motho ka botho — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 14:17:35 +0000

[...] 512Mb in it. A 1.7Ghz machine with half of that would still have been at least usable … until 10.04, [...]

By: Look out Ubuntu, look out Arch: Linux Mint Debian « Motho ke motho ka botho

Look out Ubuntu, look out Arch: Linux Mint Debian « Motho ke motho ka botho — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 11:51:04 +0000

[...] there’s the rub: Ubuntu in its grotesque corpulence, tipping the scales at more than 300Mb just to show a startup screen, is suddenly in a very, very harsh light. Linux Mint Debian is doing [...]

By: 8.04 might be your best bet « Motho ke motho ka botho

8.04 might be your best bet « Motho ke motho ka botho — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 02:22:42 +0000

[...] I abandoned Ubuntu quite a while ago and wouldn’t recommend it for anything without at least 512Mb of memory and a Pentium 4 in it, but now I see that I have to add another caveat to that … one that says Ubuntu 8.04.4 [...]

By: Not particularly worried « Motho ke motho ka botho

Not particularly worried « Motho ke motho ka botho — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 22:38:40 +0000

[...] book when discussing alternatives for hardware from a dozen years ago. Even in its sparsest forms, the sheer chunk of Ubuntu x.xx discounts it from much of anything before a Pentium III, in my humble [...]

By: YankeeDDL

YankeeDDL — Wed, 05 May 2010 09:30:06 +0000

I’ve been debating whether to reply to this or not …
A couple of disclaimers:
- “Fat” is “fat”, no matter how you look at it. And the snapshots in this post speak louder than words
- There should be no excuse for “sloppy” coding: blowing up memory (or disk) footprint just because today’s HW allows it is not a good reason (BTW, slightly off-topic: I installed Windows7 on a new machine the other day and a “fresh” install of the OS takes over 17GB of HD space … go figure).

All this said, I think we should also call things with their own name: 154Mb is obviously (much) worse than 75Mb but … “fat”?
I suppose we can all agree that from 6.06 to 10.04 Ubuntu has improved quite a bit, and, I’m sure, some of that improvement does come at a cost in terms of RAM usage.
I’m not saying Ubuntu is “lean”: Slitaz, DSL, Puppy and many more distros are there to prove it … still, on my Thinkpad none of the minimalistic (maximalistic? :p) distros work right off the bat. Wireless is a big issue, sometimes the trackpad too. Of course expecting them to work flawlessly right out of the box is unreasonable: still, 154Mb is ‘very little’ for any PC which is less than 5 years old (heck, I have 512Mb on my Inspiron 8000, which dates back to 2001).

Personally, I would love to see Ubuntu’s setup to be “customizable”: one could pick a “default/easy” option, or a “minimal” option, stripped down of all ‘embellishments’.
Of course this can be done already (you showed it yourself, with the CLI-based installation guide), but -hopefully- you see my point.

By: pogeymanz

pogeymanz — Tue, 04 May 2010 20:01:43 +0000

K.Mandla,

Long time reader, first time replier.

It seems like nobody mentioned that you are running these comparisons on two different machines: a fundamental mistake. Much software is like a gas, in that it expands to fill its container. If you have 512MB available, it will use more than if you have 192MB available. Percentage-wise, those numbers are similar (~30% off the top of my head), so I’d love to see what each version uses on the same computer.

By: Keith

Keith — Tue, 04 May 2010 19:03:31 +0000

Isn’t a problem with the DE, not with Ubuntu itself? Personally, I don’t like Ubuntu; it’s just too dumbed down and thus requires too much work to do what you want to do. I’ve tried Ubuntu and just had to go back to Mandriva, where I could customize it the way I like it. Ubuntu is Linux for (stupid) human beings.

By: evidex

evidex — Tue, 04 May 2010 17:31:33 +0000

Speaking of old Ubuntu Releases, I booted up 5.10 in a VM a while back.

http://linuxexpresso.wordpress.com/2009/12/07/badger/

I’m gonna find that vdi, and see what the RAM consumption was

By: peter griffin

peter griffin — Tue, 04 May 2010 16:59:41 +0000

No, we think Ubuntu X is ugly.

Fat dont matter.
Ugly does,

GNOME is just butt ugly.