I'm running a Debian VM on my M1 Mac (it's a mess to cleanup dependencies and tooling after a project on macOS). I also use i3wm and before launching Firefox, the whole OS consumed only 300 MB of ram. In the past I use Arch with i3wm to have enough free ram (on a 8GB laptop) for Android Studio and Firefox. Some people are angry with Apple for their 8GB offering, but it would be great to imagine what can be done with less and the operating system being just an operating system, not an application suite.

Are you saying you're using a debian VM on your Mac as a daily driver? Running i3wm and Firefox and ultimately living in Linux, but on your Mac? Does that mean you never have to use MacOS much (beside upgrading the host mac OS, and launching the VM right after boot)? If that's your setup I would love to hear more about it, the pros and the cons.

It's not my setup and it's fairly recent. I love some of the Mac software (Bear, Things, Dash, Doppler) and the Mac hardware. But dealing with project dependencies and tooling is a pain on every OS I've been. SO I bought Parallels (issues with graphic in UTM), configured a base OS, and clone it for each project. So personal workflows are still macOS-centric, but dev workflow is Linux.

I could do what you said, but the apps are nicer than Linux ones. But I still care about data portability (it's trivial to export data in all the app I use) so it's more a want, not a need.

This was exactly my setup for like 4 years a few years ago.

MacOS was the host and it was immediate boot into Debian VM and it was my main machine I used to dev every day.

Pros and cons: I switched to parallels vm software from virtualbox because it just seemed to run a LOT smoother which meant the machine ran dramatically cooler. I think this was due to the graphics driver - higher frame rates and no display glitches

I’m not a gamer but very occasionally I like to play older strategy games - this I did outside the Linux vm, since high performance graphics wasn’t good inside the vm as one would expect.

I allocated like 90% of the system RAM (machine was an Intel Mac with 64GB of ram) to the vm

Once inside the booted machine running full screen it felt native, I would forget I was in a vm

Bridged networking so other machines on my lan can ssh in,

Any other questions you have let me know!

I have always found MacPorts as the best way to manage tooling.

All packages and dependencies are installed under /opt/.

The consistent pathing is the only sane way to manage tooling.

Homebrew also installs everything under /opt/ on aarch64. Pretty convenient when you want to nuke it and start fresh.

I had thought Homebrew's purpose was to leverage Apple's bundled what not. I haven't looked at Homebrew in over a decade.

It may have started that way but now it is used to install and manage applications and it makes it really easy to do so. There is even a Linux version of homebrew now

384MB is plenty of RAM. Tiny Core Linux (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Core_Linux) requires only 46 MB, although recommends 128 MB of RAM.

It’s a ton if you avoid things Poettering was involved in (anyone remember when Pulseaudio came out and its memory use when idle was insanely high? AFAIK that never got better, we just all got more memory; Systemd’s similar), don’t run a “modern” DE, and don’t use webapps.

That’s a lot of “ifs”, but that really should be quite a bit of memory.

In fact you can’t even really run Firefox or Chrome with a single light page on that, now. In one of the minimalist WebKit browsers, yes, but probably only 2-3 tabs and no webapps.

My first PC had (what I thought of as) an infinite amount of RAM. 8 MB. I could not believe that someone (else) wanted 32 MB, it was insane.

My first hard drive had 20MB. I thought I would never fill it.

Try mocp for music, you will save tons of resources.

Also, try the new dillo fork.

With gopher, you have gopher://magical.fish and gopher://sdf.org as starting points to read news and blogs. Use either sacc or lynx.

> I use... netsurf for browsing (no JS)

> https://i.imgur.com/shozUbO.png

> https://i.imgur.com/F22p3Z8.png

> If you're seeing this message, that means JavaScript has been disabled on your browser, please enable JS to make Imgur work.

Hmmm...

Surprisingly, the images open just fine on this machine! Imgur sends me the actual .png and not the HTML wrapped version that requires JS. Maybe they look at the agent to decide what to send.

I have no problem retrieving the PNGs from those URLs without Javascript.

I'm not using a browser nor am I using curl.

I do not send a user-agent header.

This has nothing to do with OpenBSD though. Any linux or BSD kernel can run a light WM on same or older hardware just as well.

Are you sure most Linux distros still support a pentium III by default?

Hyperbola does. Alpine should. And so does Guix.