Memory and disk space

Low memory usage can help if a computer doesn’t have enough resources.

Freshly updated and with no other changes, Lubuntu consumed 7.7GB of disk space. 393MB of memory was in use on a fresh boot, and this rose to 797MB when Firefox was loaded and navigated to the Linux Format website – pretty good figures. There’s only so much a well-conceived, lightweight distribution can do when a modern browser starts to demand memory.

Absolute Linux seemed like the lighter build overall, but because it had a much bigger application loadout it wasn’t that surprising to see it consume 15GB of disk space. It did better in terms of memory usage: it only consumed 239MB, which rose to 535MB when Firefox was loaded. This might be a significant advantage if the target machine only had 1GB of memory.

4QOS used 11GB of disk space, and it was in the same league as Absolute Linux when it came to memory usage on boot at 285MB, but this rose by quite a bit to 676MB once Firefox was loaded. However, webkit browser Konqueror is the default browser in 4QOS, and loading this took things to 390MB. However, the 4QOS installer gave options for different installation profiles, so could have come in at a lighter weight if required. Linux Lite was in the middle, using 11GB of disk space and 497MB RAM on boot, but it only climbed to 630MB when Firefox was loaded.

As always, EasyOS impressed us with the low memory usage: 127MB on boot and 428MB once Firefox was loaded, which was the lowest we saw. Because of the way it compresses the main system image, disk usage was 2.8GB. However, this approach actually speeds up application launch.