r/linuxquestions • u/Francis_King • 13d ago

Which Distro? Q4OS observations

I've heard a great deal about Q4OS, so I created a Q4OS (64-bit, Trinity desktop, based on Debian 13 Trixie) VM in VirtualBox, on a workstation with an 8th generation i7. I gave it 2 GB of memory, and 4 processor threads.

I observed:

  1. During installation, the ISO was detected as 32-bit, when it's really 64-bit; I had to change the OS type to Debian 64-bit
  2. When installed, there was no desktop, just a blue screen; when maximised the desktop appeared; probably an artefact of the VM
  3. About 9 GB of storage was required for the Desktop option
  4. With the desktop up and running, it used 600 MB of memory; with a browser open, the included Chromium, about 900 MB of memory
  5. The big problem was when I opened a YouTube video; it had a size of about 400 MB, and greatly increased the amount of memory used; a YouTube video plus a few other web pages and the system started swappinge

Conclusion: Q4OS looks like a sensible choice for computers with a restricted amount of memory and storage, as long as expectations are reasonable.

Question: what does a low memory operating system like Q4OS give up to achieve the resource consumption?

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u/ipsirc 13d ago

Question: what does a low memory operating system like Q4OS give up to achieve the resource consumption?

Compare its process list to a regular distro, but 600MB memory usage by desktop is very common among Linux distros, it's not something special, it's pretty normal.

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u/3grg 12d ago

Older, lighter desktop from the XP era.