Hahaha ... everything new is scary! But you can be sure it's the future. Because there are billions of computer users who are tired of buying new hardware, choosing a particular OS and having to spend a lot of time configuring it. Not here, in the Devuan Forum, but out there in the world. When users buy a new computer, 99% of them are sure to be with Windows. What it costs? $ 100-200 I think. But the normal user is afraid to buy an "empty" computer and install Linux because he doesn't know how. You have to understand it, it's not about your egoism, but about the large number of users who are ripped off. And we want them to finally get what they want. So a computer, cheap and good, with the option to choose the operating system without having to make any effort. People pay thousands of dollars for the newest model of car, but they don't want to know how to install it. They just want to drive around with it. Microsoft is not ready yet to bring out a jOS and Microsoft has no interest in it, because Microsoft wins billions of US dollars every year with their junk. And Microsoft certainly also has stakes in hardware manufacturers. It's that easy to make money when you intimidate people and tell them you can't work without our product. Linux therefore has the chance to be the first. Linus certainly has enough money to buy the first application servers and file servers. The rest will come :-) You have to think bigger and with love!

After looking at all of the derivatives on the list and reading your posts ... I'll stick with the original Devuan. Why?

I could tell you now the life story of Siddharta Gautama, or that of St. Francis, or another. But maybe that would bore you? So I'm trying to make it shorter.

Linus Torvalds had seen something. He is a very intelligent man and he wants to give something to the world. It's okay that he got rich with it. Because he did a good job. Others have worked very badly in the same field and have become a lot richer than him! Why?

Because the others have built huge corporations and their only need is money. The thing about philanthropy is just a nice mask. And that's why these people can continue to earn a lot of money with a trash product. Keep your product together, make it the quais standard and the vast majority of people will buy it from you. As simple as that.

But Linus Torvalds didn't do it that way, because he knows what freedom is worth. People should come to Linux because it's better and because it's easy. Ok, better and easy!

Advise a Windows user to switch to Linux. He will tell you that Linux is complicated and that there are so many distributions that he doesn't know which one is right for him. Then you tell him which one you think is the right one. He then asks 3 other Linux users and they tell him 3 other stories. And then the Windows user stays where he is, with Windows, because there he doesn't have to decide, just pay.

How many distros are there? And how many are good? And how many are up to date? And how many have a future? And how many are easy? Nobody knows!

And what do we need? We need a very small one for very old hardware, 2-3 normal ones for daily home use, 1-2 for commercial purposes. The rest we can delete!

We have the very small ones, like TinyCore. We also have normal ones, Devuan, Debian, Fedora, Arch, Gentoo, etc. And there are also commercial ones, for example Red Hat or openSUSE. Actually too many. Then there is the problem with systemd and probably also with OSS / alsa.

Let's choose a small one, 3 normal ones, and a commercial one and focus on these. With concentrated development power, we can easily oust Windows.

Is it freedom when everyone can make their own distro? And does it make sense and does it have a future? No, it just confuses and keeps users back on Windows. And it's not just Windows! These moneymaker networks are much larger. I took a quick look, one of the newest notebooks from hp has 16GB Ram! I can load my entire Linux, including all applications, into it.

It is not forbidden or bad to make money. But it's very bad if you deserve to fool people. And it's also very bad if you spend your money on bad things to fool even more people. This has nothing to do with capitalism or communism, but with normality or psychopathy!

Linus Torvalds is said to have been a geek in the past. At least that's what he says. But he educated himself, went to university and was successful with it. Bill Gates did it in a different way, because he's not normal. And we have to be careful that we don't have more and more people on Linux who are like Bill Gates and just want to do their own thing. Don't forget, it's about helping the world with a good heart. Linus Torvalds was and is not a "hacker", but a computer scientist with a solid education. And that's what we need, or one day Linux will become a "toy operating system" that will only be used by "geeks" who don't understand anything.

have a nice week!

Ok, thanks for the first tips!

I used zRam with Lubuntu. But with only 1GB Ram it is questionable whether it is of much use, especially when surfing. I had zRam configured to 25% of the Ram. I also had a 2GB swapfile. I worked with Chromium and found that there were always long waiting times, even blockages. It went better without zRam. I assume that zRam, swapfile and the browser cache do not coordinate and therefore all 3 together can cause a problem. Of course only with a small ram.

Opera is not particularly small, but it uses very good algorithms to coordinate the RAM and the browser cache. Opera never fills up the RAM, but always leaves something free for other applications. Opera also has very interesting options in the settings. Vivaldi isn't quite as good, but not bad either. Chromium and Firefox regularly lead to waiting times (swapfile, browser cache) or even to blockages.

zswap would be of interest to me. So a swapfile that works with compression. This could speed up swapping, especially swapping back. But so far I haven't found any good instructions. It is apparently still very new and still under development. Maybe someone knows more?

I installed the default desktop, so X ... Maybe I can reduce a few things, wallpaper for example. With antiX I have a RAM usage of about 130MB after booting. Let's see how deep I can get down with Devuan without losing too much GUI. Because after all I want that, because otherwise I would not have installed Devuan next to antiX :-)

Thanks for pointing out the Devuan derivatives! I see there is a lot to read and test :-)

But first I'll test something else, namely to replace alsa with OSS. I have the impression that alsa is not really very well-founded when it comes to the acoustic basics ;-)

I'm always grateful for further tips regarding low ram :-)