1. Vencord is running in the background.
2. Most people aren’t watching YouTube in 4k on their computer
3. I have a good bit of stuff cached in memory (as shown by the different colors in htop)

My system uses under 4gb watching a 4k video on youtube. I can’t imagine many people are doing anything much more intensive than that.

Forget everything anyone told you about Linux, think of each distro as its own OS.

Flatpak and Snap are the ones that work with everything and are the closest equivalents to .exe files. App images are kinda like the portable apps that were popular like 10-15years ago on windows. (Anyone remember using portable Firefox on a flashdrive?)

In addition to these each distro has its own kind of package format. (.DEB, .APK, .RPM, etc)

Just because 2 distros share a package format doesn’t mean they are compatible, in the same way a winxp .exe might not work on win11.

Idk if windows still has a 32bit version, or if it has an ARM version, but that’s what the .amd64 and .arm64 thing is for. Most people want .amd64.

Except for the .RPM package (which is presumably a Fedora package) all of these are clearly labeled by distro (Debian 10, Debian 11, Ubuntu, etc).

If you have a 64bit CPU and run Debian 11, you want:

debian-11-amd64.deb

but why run this over flatpak,snap,or appimage?

Disk space. System packages like this do not bundle the dependencies to run the application with it. Instead the dependencies are installed on the system a single time and shared between all applications.

Nowadays there is a push to migrate to using things like flatpak and snap but some old school Linux heads don’t really want to for either political reasons or just because it’s different than what they are used to.

I’m a big big fan of Debian. The installer can be a little intimidating for newbies but I think it’s a great all-around “throw it at the wall” kinda Linux distro. Ubuntu is based on it so you’ll find similarities between them.

All the power to ya! Doesn’t matter if it’s Stable, Testing, or Unstable, if it works for you that’s all that matters.

There is a way to “pin” package versions isn’t there?

I wonder if that would prevent this kind of thing from uninstalling a package that is in transition. Ofc, it wouldn’t get any updates, but I’d take that over just not having the package.

Flatpak works though!

Debians testing branch might be a good shout. Packages stay pretty up-to-date and usually stuff doesn’t break. Worst case you can pull a package from unstable when needed.

I think linux distros are a coinflip on if they like your hardware or not, sometimes it feels like they just don’t like you individually as a person.

When I use fedora for example, everything that can go wrong does go wrong. It’s in theory not any more complicated than debian, but I’ve never had good luck keeping a fedora system healthy.

With Debian, usually the best troubleshooting tip I can give people is try installing testing instead of stable. Sometimes the kernel in stable is just too damn old for the hardware you want to install on.

Debian just works.

Even a system that uses 90mb of ram on a cold boot will accumulate gigs of stuff in cache if you’re using it. (assuming it has the memory for it) That isn’t what people have a problem with though.

Maybe this is an incorrect use of language on my part, but I feel like I’m not the only person who means “memory actively being used by a process” when referring to memory usage. I understand the whole linux ate my ram thing. That just isn’t what I or what I assume a lot of people mean when talking about this.

When I boot up my system, pull up my terminal, run htop, and see 800-1200mb being used just by processes (not in buffer, not in cache), that doesn’t raise any flags or anything, but I also know that some people have gotten their systems so streamlined they use 10x less than that. That’s all memory that could be used by other things. That could be the difference between a low memory system running a web browser or not. Could be the difference maker in a game someone wants to play on their system. There are endless possibilities.

I use it because I’m frankly too dumb to use something else, but if that wasnt the case, i dont think id be speaking fondly of it.

I’m a ram usage fetishist, I absolutely disagree with the “unused ram is wasted ram” phrase that has caught on with people.

I see some of these distros running a graphical environment with only 90mb ram usage and i cream myself. All of them run something other than systemd, usually avoid GNU stuff, and…require you basically to be a developer to use them.

I already run a half broken, hacked together system due to my stubborness, I can’t imagine how fucked I’d be if I tried one of these cool kid minimalist distros.

Linux users are gooners confirmed.