[GTALUG] Lightweight Linux Distributions and Graphics Drivers

[Giles Orr]

On Wed, 13 May 2020 at 16:50, Nicholas Krause via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
> 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/

I would strongly suggest NOT using anything based on Debian unstable
in these circumstances.  Unstable is meant for developers.  Sure, it's
totally up-to-date when it's made available, but here's the problem:
if they don't follow the Debian unstable repositories, they're not
getting the updates they should.  If they DO follow the Debian
unstable repositories, doing updates is like drinking from a fire hose
- the package thrash is huge.  A few years back I installed a
"lightweight" distro made on this model: it installed easily, using
about 1G on a 2G partition.  It ran well.  Two months later I booted
the machine and casually typed 'apt-get dist-upgrade' ... and the
process filled the entire hard drive with packages and crashed the
machine, without ever getting to actually doing the upgrade.

Not a good model.

> 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

-- 
Giles
https://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr at gmail.com