[GTALUG] Lightweight Linux Distributions and Graphics Drivers

[Nicholas Krause]

Greetings.

I've not looked recently but from memory and the discussion yesterday 
seems people
have a use case for them. Off the top of my memory the three ideal 
candidates depending
on what you requirements  would be:

1. Arch or Gentoo if your fine rolling basically your own distro with a 
package manager
2. Debian - Any version with a lightweight desktop should work
3. Debian unstable derivatives based on Debian unstable. Seems there 
were a lot, the only issue
was some like antix were 32 bit, but it now seems to have a 64 bit 
version. They recommend 256
mems  of ram and I was able to open like 3 "normal tabs without hitting 
swap in firefox with that.
Idles between 0 and 3% of a single core from a i5 2500K at 4.2 Ghz in a 
VM. Rarely hits 3 percent
at idle, through mostly its a flat 0% to 1% usage. Even on that amount 
of hardware it was
surprisingly fast. And yes it can probably run YouTube 1080p on a 
Pentium 4 with enough ram,
didn't try through.
https://antixlinux.com/

Debian or Arch would be best if your using GPU packages as those would 
be in either AUR, the
user Arch repo probably or another non distribution repo for Debian.

Also to my knowledge outside of Nvidia and a few ARM vendors most GPUs 
are upstreamed in
Mesa these days. The problem is that Nvidia has been the only real 
choice in the high end due
to it performing better there  for the last few years, there are rumors 
of Intel building
discrete cards through:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-xe-graphics-all-we-know

Maybe that helps some people as I forget to mention this yesterday,
Nick

-- 
Fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism--something it is like for the organism. - Thomas Nagel