MX is really impressive.

[Moltke]

Last Monday I ran an "experiment"; I wanted to ckeck on whether those Distros which claim to be lightweigh were really as lighweigh as their claim. So, next thing I did was to open virtualbox, create a VM, named it "test" and load some .isos in live mode with it. The thing was that RAM I assigned was only 512MB, and I was really impressed to see not only that MX would boot fast considering but also that it'd behave quite smooth; menus open and close quickly, thunar loaded quickly too. I didn't load FF since I didn't think it'd work, FF alone uses around 300MB and something just to open and load home page. Another distros that did well were Xubuntu, Bodhi and Q4OS. Some other needed a little more RAM and/or I had to wait quite a while for them to completely load and even then usage was literally null; too slow and unresponsive. So, I want to say great work MX team! I already thought this was a fine hell of a distro but now I'm just very impressed as well as happy and proud to be one more member of the MX community!



Cheers!

[Jerry3904]

Did you try antiX?

[Moltke]

Did you try antiX?

No, I didnt, for the same reason I didn't try Puppy or Slax; I already knew they were fast. However, I just did. Antix 17.2 used 97MB on boot and usage was even smoother than with MX. No wonder MX behaved like that being that Antix is part of it. One thing I noticed is that screenshots I took from VBox menu didn't work with Antix; the resulting file was a black empty screen, this one I took using MX's screenshot tool.

[oops]

The best configuration is the one that consumes the most available memory (in normal use, but without hdd swapping), while being as fluid as possible.

[Moltke]

The best configuration is the one that consumes the most available memory (in normal use, but without hdd swapping), while being as fluid as possible.

I've done that before but this time I just wanted to see which Distros would boot and behave better on those conditions; within a VM with only 512MB for RAM. Not many did, and those that did barely manage to work, however, MX did better than the rest and the other ones I mentioned in the first post did quite well too. Although now that I tried Antix it is obvious that it did better than MX, but I kind of knew it, and that's the reason I didn't think of trying it in the first test.

[Jerry3904]

I asked my question because MX does not claim to be lightweight, and we specifically declare ourselves on the Home page and elsewhere as "midweight."

[Moltke]

I asked my question because MX does not claim to be lightweight, and we specifically declare ourselves on the Home page and elsewhere as "midweight."

I know that. But others do so I might have genelarized and put them all together whether it's them or users who clasify them, label them as such.

[cyrilus31]

Above 512 Go of ram, the limiting factor is CPU not really ram (from my experiments), except if you open dozens of tabs, or use heavy demanding programs. A correct dual core (post P4 period) is needed to have a good experience (in my opinion). My pentium 4 struggles on antiX - it reachs 100% regularly.

[Moltke]

Above 512 Go of ram, the limiting factor is CPU not really ram (from my experiments), except if you open dozens of tabs, or use heavy demanding programs. A correct dual core (post P4 period) is needed to have a good experience (in my opinion). My pentium 4 struggles on antiX - it reachs 100% regularly.

Yes, you're right, however, most "lightweigh" distros won't run or run poorly with 512MB of RAM from what I could see. For instance, a quad core would be better than a dual-core to run VMs, since you could assing 2 cores to them and the more RAM you can assign the better performance you'll get as well. I've been playing with VMs for quite a long time now, been using virtualbox from the very beginning it came out, back in the days with Windows trying Linux distros and now under Linux as well. Also, I have a Windows 7 VM so I can use some apps that don't work in Linux, not even with wine, that one uses 1,5GB of RAM, otherwise it won't run. My pc's total RAM is 4GB and cpu is an amd athlon 64 x2 5000+ 2.7Mhz and it handles it quite well.

[cyrilus31]

Yes, you're right, however, most "lightweigh" distros won't run or run poorly with 512MB of RAM from what I could see.

This is why I said "above"
My P4 laptop was almost happy with 1 go of ram and MX16. But it's too much for an old processor. Feasible but not so pleasant.