Do you use any of the other XFCE stuff with Niri? Or just the terminal?

MPV is a much lighter video player. Try that.

I was trying to think of the oldest hardware I have run modern Linux on (probably an old Pentium II) when I remembered that I used to run SLS on a 486 (33 MHz, 4 MB of RAM).

Punch cards. The “true” PC era.

“Stone” tablets? Luxury. Ours were dried mammoth dung.

Are you running Trinity or KDE?

Not sure why I get so much less unless it is that. Or are you saying you run Trinity 64 bit?

I agree that 32 bit is not often going to be 50% less in practice. Sometimes I think we should be running 64 bit kernels with 32 bit userland.

I found my people.

I have Linux on a 2009 and 2012 MacBook Pro and 2013 and 2017 MacBook Airs.

The 2009 is getting a bit sluggish but for regular stuff, they all work great. We even played a Steam game on the 2012 earlier today (not AAA obviously).

All Chimera Linux.

It is because it is 32 bit. You can run a 32 bit distro on your machine too if you really want.

You can get a full Trinity desktop on Q4OS in 130 MB of RAM (32 bit edition).

.NET runs fast on Linux

Well, Niri is a dynamic and scrolling tiling compositor. So it offers that.

Well, and Niri supports Wayland.

I use Plasma 6 on Wayland on devices as old as 2009 and as new as 2020. Apple laptops to Intel desktops with GPUs from Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA.

Wayland is better than Xorg on every machine I run.

I can absolutely deny that Wayland has stability issues. Plasma 6 under Wayland is the most stable desktop I have used.

In any Wayland discussion, I think people using Debian or older NVIDIA drivers (pre-555 for sure) need to identify themselves. They seem to be the ones most convinced that Wayland does not work yet (because they are still experiencing what it was like years ago).

As for “support”, that is desktop environment dependent as it mostly depends on protocol and XDG desktop portal maturity. KDE has the most complete support (not a bias-just a fact), then GNOME, then Hyprland and the Wlroots based environments, with MATE and Cinnamon not quite there yet, and XFCE totally trailing.

Any information generated or collected by government should only be stored in open file formats. That is the biggest issue right there.

Any software that citizens are required to use MUST be Open Source is the next biggest one.

Third is that any software created with public funds must be Open Source.

Finally, Open Source should be the preference in all government procurement. Exceptions where viable Open Source options do not exist should be allowed.

All government data needs to be stored in-country if possible and at least on continent if not. Suppliers bound in their home country by laws which could threaten the data sovereignty of their customers should be excluded from government contracts (so all US based companies).

You also use the portal helper from another DE though.

For example, the Niri Wayland compositor, written in Rust with Smithay, uses xdg-desktop-portal-gnome (which I imagine is written in C).

Hahahahahaha. Good one.

Me too. I am already enjoying the discounted Intel laptops. They will really come down when macOS 27 comes out and OpenCore Legacy Patcher stops working on them.

There should certainly be some good desktop deals this Christmas for sure.

Do you have a spare SSD? Throw Linux on it and try it out for a while. You can always go back.

Who told you that?

How do you propose to do that?

Let’s say there are 2 billion desktop computers in the world and that Linux is installed on 3% of them.

That is 60 million Linux desktop users.

That is more than enough to sustain a vibrant ecosystem. Linux does not really need more market share to keep being an excellent option.