Linux Desktop Environments System Usage
People forget that the entire early MacOs, GEOS, windows DE&#x27;s used to run in a matter of a couple hundred K.<p>The entire system requirements of a windows 2k PC were 64M of ram, and yes it could display a background picture on a HD+ level display and pretty much do everything that is possible on a modern PC that your average user is doing. The darn thing was 32-bit, meaning that the apps could never allocate more than 2G (or 3G on a tuned machine) of address space and it was enough, even for video editing&#x2F;etc.<p>Back when FF went 64-bit&#x2F;multi process I groaned because having a fixed 2G limit, which seemed terrible at the time, created a nice upper bound on how much CPU+RAM it would consume so the developers assured it ran reasonably well with those kinds of system resources. Now the sky&#x27;s the limit, and if you dare limit its resource utilization via cgroups&#x2F;etc it won&#x27;t work 1&#x2F;2 the time.<p>And of course its your fault if you don&#x27;t have a 16 core, 32G PC. To run a text editor and a chat application.