Lightest Weight OS for PB
#2
I think lightweight is very much about memory consumption and maybe a snappy response time from the GUI.

So my suggestion would be to choose something with low memory requirements.
Linux itself can be set up in different ways but to be honest it’s difficult to save more than 50MB by that   in a modern environment.

Therefore I would suggest to look after lightweight desktop environments (DE)

The smallest, directly available for a Pinebook image is probably Q4OS with TDE.  

The next could be  LXQt wich you find in several images. It comes as an alternative for Q4OS and default in one image of Manjaro. Also I am sure you can install it on almost every image currently available for the Pinebook. ASOC seems to be aiming for lightweight as well, but I have not tested it yet.

The next a bit more medium lightweight DE is XFce.

Mind you this is just my personal view and others would cut this slightly differently. However the listed DE are quite lightweight.

I guess a good result is if you boot with nothing else started and about 300MB - 350MB of memory are used.

I don’ know Mint and what resources it uses and if you are close to that I guess it wont make much difference.

There two more things you can explore:

- dont use a desktop environment at all but only a window manager (wm). that would be a bit more simplistic user interface and there are versions that are more mouse oriented like the window manager openbox for example or there are tiling window manager which you usually use more with your keyboard, however that works surprisingly well. This can get you in the area of about 100MB memory use at startup but generally requires a bit more willingness to tinker with settings.
 A very popular tiling wm is called i3. An more simple but also with a nice works out of the box feeling is called spectrwm. 

- Turn the blink off in your desktop environment. If there is transparancy, turn it off. Fading of all sorts, turn it off, etc.. if animations have a parameter to set how long they take set it to super short. This will not safe so much memory but will give a very snappy response feeling of your GUI. This works even nice with KDE witch is probably a more heavy DE. (Don’t turn the compositor in KDE off though, it needs it)


Messages In This Thread
Lightest Weight OS for PB - by machinehum - 11-21-2018, 11:12 AM
RE: Lightest Weight OS for PB - by Surehand53 - 11-21-2018, 11:57 AM
RE: Lightest Weight OS for PB - by machinehum - 11-27-2018, 03:30 PM
RE: Lightest Weight OS for PB - by e-minguez - 11-28-2018, 08:25 AM
RE: Lightest Weight OS for PB - by rpm - 12-01-2018, 11:08 AM
RE: Lightest Weight OS for PB - by dhylton - 12-07-2018, 12:30 PM
RE: Lightest Weight OS for PB - by dhylton - 12-07-2018, 04:22 PM
RE: Lightest Weight OS for PB - by rpm - 12-09-2018, 08:02 AM
RE: Lightest Weight OS for PB - by Surehand53 - 12-09-2018, 10:04 AM
RE: Lightest Weight OS for PB - by dhylton - 12-09-2018, 08:07 PM
RE: Lightest Weight OS for PB - by ImmortanJoe - 12-08-2018, 06:22 AM
RE: Lightest Weight OS for PB - by fxfuji - 02-02-2019, 06:59 AM
RE: Lightest Weight OS for PB - by notpod - 05-14-2019, 07:59 AM
RE: Lightest Weight OS for PB - by giel - 05-22-2019, 08:47 AM

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