[vox] SuSE Bloat

[Bill Kendrick]

On Thu, Feb 02, 2006 at 12:57:42PM -0800, Bob Scofield wrote:
> Last night I read that SuSE 10.0 requires 256 megs, and that 510 megs is 
> recommended.  Isn't this a bit much?  How do other distros stack up in 
> comparison?  Do people think SuSE is getting out of hand here, or is this the
> norm for any contemporary desktop whether it be Windows or Linux?

Well, I think the issue is that SUSE is saying what your full desktop
environment might require.  That's not "Linux", though.  That's Linux plus
whatever desktop and desktop apps (and perhaps related services/servers)
are running.

I'd imaging it'd be possible to strip down SUSE and make it into a nice
server-only environment, or something that runs TWM + Rox(?) + Xterm,
instead of GNOME + Nautilus + everything else + GNOME Terminal,
or KDE + Konqueror + everything else + Konsole.  And it would certainly
not require 256-512MB of RAM.

My wife recently (in the last year?) upgraded her Thinkpad T20 from 128MB
to 512MB.  She's running Debian, KDE 3 and Firefox.  Her main problem was
that she had insanely complicated graphics she was trying to manipulate
using Inkscape.  And large scanned pictures she was editing (with lots of
layers) in The Gimp.

So in the end, it depends on what you want to do with it.  If you're going
to stick with whatever default config. SUSE puts in front of you, then
a 256-512MB RAM requirement makes sense.  But you probably don't need to
_live_ with SUSE's default config., and can likely scale down your UI
(and shut down services that you don't use) to make it fit your hardware's
capabilities...


(Ob disclaimer: This is coming from someone who's never used SUSE or SuSE.
;^) )

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