On 12/5/16, Julie Marchant onpon4@riseup.net wrote:
by contrast: fvwm2 is an 8 *megabyte* install size. gnome is... what... several hundred megabytes? latest versions force you to use wayland? and systemd?? fuck that!! absolutely no way i'm tolerating that.
GNOME does not force you to use Wayland. I don't know where you got this idea from. Wayland is still supported experimentally (X is used by default, Wayland support is quite buggy) last time I checked. As for systemd, GNOME requires logind, but not the entire systemd package.
that requires libsystemd, which i refuse to have on any machine that i am managing. there seems to be something desperately wrong with how gnome (and systemd) are being developed and funded: i can't put my finger on it, but i can tell that there's something really, really wrong.
that and the work-efficiency level of my using gnome is a *reduction* not an increase... no. cannot and will not do it. i won't even put average end-users on gnome: i go to a *lot* of trouble to install TDE for my clients.
To be clear, I wasn't suggesting trying to do your work on an A20 card, or anything else you produce in the next few years. That would be absurd. More that maybe it would be a good idea to optimize things so that you don't have to keep upgrading and eventually an EOMA card of some sort can catch up.
it'll require an x86-compatible processor or a hardware-accelerated VM capable of running x86 instructions (such as the MIPS64 ICT-designed china-state-sponsored Loongson 3H), because i need to run x86 windows (tried wine: spectacular fail). that means it's going to be several years. by that time, 8GB of RAM should be insanely low cost and should be the "norm".
It seems even just managing to reduce your screen need so that a 1080p screen would suffice would be a huge help.
can't do it.... purely and simply because i now *know* that i would be more efficient and effective with a larger resolution screen.
By the way, have you considered turning off swap?
yes. tried it. didn't go so well.
Linux will automatically terminate programs when there just isn't any RAM left,
... exactly. it actively prevented and prohibited me from being able to simultaneously run the applications that i needed in order to work effectively and efficiently.
so that would at least prevent your system from slowing to a crawl. Also, using swap on an SSD is probably really terrible for the SSD.
it seems to be ok up to a point on the macbook pro one, but beyond a certain point the SSD appears to go into "maintenance" for up to a few seconds at a time, ceasing to deal with writes and reads. generally this is bad :)
I don't know if you can control what programs get closed when that happens, though.
exactly. it's not worth investigating if i need the programs running. if they're running, *i* can choose to do killall -STOP {progname} temporarily, which i do regularly, followed by killall -CONT later when i want it re-enabled. not ideal, but workable.
l.