Jason, I have to ask, how old are you? The first computer I ran Linux on has 2 megabytes of RAM. It was a 386SX, ran at 16MHz, and I had to beg, borrow and steal (metaphorically) to get the 200mb harddrive I needed to get Linux going. Back then all these things were really important to pretty much everyone running Linux. Because all of us, 100% of us, were hobbyists. Not one single person was running Linux in a business environment, or really using it for anything critical or even important. I was still dual-booting into DOS to get my FidoMail! Yes, there are still a lot of hobbyist out there, and that element still exists for most of us, even the ones running Linux full-time and adminning THOUSANDS of Linux machines for their job. And I do realise that there still are a lot of people using "old" hardware to run Linux on (and "old" is in quotes because compared to that 386sx I mentioned, your hardware is brand spankin' new) and to those people that memory footprint is important. But you do have to realise that a lot of people -- a LOT of people -- are running Linux full-time on fully functional current or even cutting-edge-modern machines. And see, THIS WAS THE DREAM for a long time - Linux taking it's place as a desktop OS. Some of us are running Linux on machines with Intel i7 CPUs, two GPUs, three monitors, 24 gigs of RAM and several TERABYTES of harddrive space. I'm running a pretty big-footprint Ubuntu right now (although I don't run Gnome/Unity/KDE on it). You know how much of my RAM is currently being used? 5%. I still have a memory monitor on my desktop but frankly it's more a legacy thing plus I think it looks neat. I'm not running out of memory anytime soon, even if I do have a bunch of browsers open, am building JAVA apps, transcoding video and running several VMs. There's room for all of us, Jason. Your usage of Linux is not the only way people use the thing. On Sat, 5 Nov 2011, Jason Hsu wrote: > Is it just me, or is it only the lightweight distros that come with the Conky display showing the memory usage enabled? I know antiX Linux has Conky displayed out-of-the-box, and I've only seen that feature in a handful of other distros, such as Damn Small Linux and CrunchBang. > > I can't recall ever seeing Conky's display of memory usage enabled in a heavyweight distro. > > In my cynical opinion, I think this is no accident. The most lightweight distros WANT you to see how much RAM is in use. antiX Linux looks good when it shows that it's only using something like 40 MB at idle. The heavyweight distros don't want you to see how much RAM is in use because it would make them look grossly inefficient. It doesn't look good if the OS needs 500 MB of RAM just to idle and 2+ GB of RAM to do actual work. > > -- > Jason Hsu <jhsu802701 at jasonhsu.com> > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > -Yaron --