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Are there any discrepancies between the resources an OS uses when running in a virtual machine vs being ran directly?

I recently found out about a Linux Distro named Q4OS and I wanted to test out their claim that it only requires 256 MB of ram when using the trinity desktop environment. However, when I used the live cd in virt-manager with 256 MB or ram, it just kernel panicked at boot. So I then tried it with 512 MB of ram. In addition to some issues that are not present when you are using at least 1 GB of ram, such as "sudo apt update" causing the entire VM to become unresponsive, I noticed that it seemed to actually use anywhere between 290 MB to 370 MB of ram when the only thing running was the process viewer (which is htop).

Obviously, this is still very low for a modern Linux distro but I was wondering how accurate VMs are for testing ram usage.

And, yes I know that it would be pretty much useless on a PC that only had 256 MB of ram even if it did work. I'm actually checking the ram usage because there is a possibility that I may be using a very old computer of mine that only has 1 GB of ram at some point in the future. So I'm just testing it and eventually other distros out to to see which one I'm going to end up using (assuming I do actually end up even using that computer).

Edit: I just tried the 32-bit version in virt-manager and htop stated it was only using 232 MB of ram, which means that their claim was right and that I might have been using the wrong version.

Edit 2: I just tried installing the 64-bit version in virt-manager and htop stated that it was using about 350 MB of ram, so I don't know if installing it actually made a difference.

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  • Yes their benchmarks will have been on a normal system, installed on the disk. If it is the live USB, everything should be loaded to RAM (Clonezilla can run completely from RAM) so that you dont suffer from the USB bottleneck.

    Why do you care about low RAM? This often means, that the system is very inefficient. If you cache stuff in RAM, your system gets faster and you save SDD read/writes, which increases its lifespan.

    RAM lasts near forever. If you have more, the system should use more. If you use the system and run very intense programs, the system should adapt and use less. But if you are one of the dudes running Arch with 32GB of RAM, the system should cache everything it has.

    • Did you not read the part of my post where I mentioned that I was planning on running this on an old computer that only has 1 GB of ram?

      • If you only have 1 GB of RAM, you definitely need to use a 32 bit distro. Regardless of the WM or DE, 64 bit software is going to chew through that 1 GB fast.

        I have been playing around with the Q4OS Trinity 32 bit and I had forgotten how much lighter 32 bit software is memory-wise. I have a full DE ( Trinity ), Firefox with a couple tabs, Thunar, LibreOffice Calc, GIMP, and Scribus all open and I am still only using 935 MB. Awesome.

        It is certainly the lightest systemd based distro I have used.

        There is definitely some software missing from the repos. I could not find dotnet or Visual Studio Code which I am sure are in 64 bit Debian. But Nala, Neovim, GCC, Clang, Rust, Go, and friends are all still there. Libmobiledevice connects to my iPhone just fine.

        It even has Podman and Distrobox although none of the 64 bit images work of course.

        Lxqt is in the Q4OS 32 bit distros. You could try that if you want but Trinity seems fine.

      • Sorry.

        Note that many modern Desktops may only use as much RAM if they have as much.

        Anyways, use LXQt, it is based on Qt6 now, will have Wayland support soon, and can be used with Wayfire or even tiling window managers, maybe even the one from COSMIC!

        • I've been looking into lightweight Linux distros on and off for a while now, so I have heard of LXQt. The only problem is that I have no experience with installing a desktop environment, so if there is a distro that can use it and it would use less ram than the 32-bit version of Q4OS (which is already less than 256 MB), I'd want a distro that has it preinstalled.

          It would be easy if there was a list/database that contained a sort-able list of how much ram every distro used. But I've never found one, the closest was a list of lightweight distros on Wikipedia but that list is very outdated and is also missing a lot of distros.

          • https://fedoraproject.org/spins/lxqt/

            I dont think it uses below 256MB but lets see? It is a moder desktop and soon with LXQt 6.1 you can install Wayfire, Kwin or other compositors and should be able to just select the different compositor in the login menu, and have Wayland.

            • I'm not familiar with Fedora, as I've only ever used Debian and Debian derivatives. I also can't seem to find any information on the system requirements for the LXQt spin of Fedora. I may still check it out in the future because I don't know if I will always stick with the Xfce edition of Linux Mint for my main computer, but right now I'm just looking for a Linux distro for my old computer and Q4OS seems to be fine.

              • All these distros are very similar. You just use dnf instead of apt, thats its. And repos get synced automatically.

                If you really really want to stay on the apt side (I wouldnt), you can use the OG Lubuntu, which was a driving force in LXDE and LXQt development. But you will want to run unsnap to remove the bloat and make it as small as possible.

                LXQt uses less RAM than XFCE and it is now fully based on Qt6. XFCE is based on XOrg which is not maintained since forever. LXQt is really close to being Wayland ready, which is also faster and more efficient than XOrg's spaghetti code.

                But as Ubuntu progresses too slow to get the latest cool stuff, I would recommend Fedora. It really is nice.

                • The main reason I'm currently staying with Linux Mint is because it's what I have installed and it works for me. I may switch to a different distro in the future but right now, I have no reason to. I'd also have concerns about software availability, which from what I've seen, Debian (and I think Arch to some extent) currently has the most software available.

                  Also, Xfce is currently in the process of adding support for Wayland. They have stated in their roadmap that they want full support for Wayland in version 4.20 and they are working on porting everything and making sure that everything works. You can read about their current progress here: https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap

                  • Yes certainly reinstalling and software availability are a thing.

                    You can check packages.fedoraproject.org and copr.fedorainfracloud.org for packages. COPR is like the AUR.

                    Interesting thanks for the link. Strangely it doesnt work when I am german, but searching for it I get the same one.

                    I recommend the Episode "Super PCMan" by Linux User Space. It is pretty interesting, and LXQt has a smaller footprint and runs on the latest framework.

                    I see that they kind of some time plan the GTK4 ports, but LXQt is already on the latest Qt. I dont know how well supported GTK3 is really, but I guess it is okay?

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