I agree with Yaron's general sentiments. My own preference has changed several times over the last 12+ years I've been using *nix on the desktop. I used to be into cutting edge stuff and using Gentoo really helped me learn the insides of a linux OS and had (has?) a real active user community. It also has some cool features like their Portage software management system (yes shamlessly based on BSD ports) and continual up-to-date-ness with respect to distro release versions. I floated around for a while but over the last 2 years or so have been real happy with Ubuntu on my desktops and laptops. I've all of the fancy bells and whistles turned on within gnome in my 3 monitor desktop and an old XP I virtualized now running in vmware workstation for those couple of windows only apps. With SSD and tons of RAM I don't see any reason to spend (waste) time tweaking every little detail to gain a few extra cycles from my system. I'd rather be productive with my time instead of tinkering all the time. That said when a problem does arise I have the know-how + google to get my issues resolved. I just want my computer to work. When I want to play games I fire up Heroes of Newerth or even some real old school FPS's like UT2004 or Q3 or anything in Dosbox for the old classics. But with all the web based games it makes OS's less relevant. Check out Gemcraft, its a pretty sweet series of flash based tower defense games. A personal general rule of thumb, if I have to spend a bunch of time figuring out how to make something work its probably not worth my time. When I see people running Win7 get a BSOD I just laugh and laugh thinking "I am SO glad I don't deal with winwoes anymore" especially when I am wearing my t-shirt that says "The box said requires Windows 98 or better, so I installed Linux" so I can rub in their face my freedom from some of those egregious annoyances. Jason, I figured you'd be a fan of OpenBSD with their strict adherence to code correctness and removing wasteful code and code with unfriendly licenses (proprietary code, GPL, etc) from their base OS which leaves a generally smaller footprint in terms of resource utilization. Perhaps more than $0.02 but you can keep the change. Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile -----Original Message----- From: Yaron <tclug at freakzilla.com> Sender: tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org Date: Sat, 5 Nov 2011 19:42:03 To: TCLUG<tclug-list at mn-linux.org> Reply-To: TCLUG Mailing List <tclug-list at mn-linux.org> Subject: Re: [tclug-list] The distros with Conky enabled 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 -- _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota tclug-list at mn-linux.org http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list