While considering a purchase, I think on the relative speed of using how much RAM to SSD. Used to be, one thought of trying to get enough RAM to stay out of Swap.
BTW, how much RAM is needed for the Pure OS to stay out of Swap, (I am guessing it has something like Swap enabled)
I am guessing it is much less a worry of how much RAM one has with the drive being an SSD, unless one is doing something intensive, like Video Editing. The amount of RAM is not much important at all.
More simply, for simple Web Surfing, the speed of the laptop is always much faster than the speed of WiFi. ??
I am curious of how the different models compare to one another in real life benchmarks, with some of the emphasis being on internet speed. ??
Anyone have any experiences to share on different combinations of RAM/SSD speed?
more than 4gb would be great. but if you really know what you’re doing and have an exceptional reason you could configure your OS to not make any swap partitions or just disable it manually each time you feel like it from the Gnome ‘Disks’ utility (available i think with gnome 3.30 and higher)
yes pureOS like any debian based gnu+linux distribution has enabled swap by default but it is not a big concern if you have a decent size hdd/ssd. i keep mine 16Gb because i have 16 gb RAM but it is too much as i haven’t really gone over the ram allocation yet. in general it’s nice to have at least 2gb if you don’t mind it but it’s not a MUST anymore on modern sistems.
i think you’re over analizing this too much. just add a 50% tolerance to what you would use as total RAM daily and you will be fine. just make sure that the device you get can be upgraded later and it has 2 slots of RAM (at least) on the motherboard. the current librem 13/15 v4 doesn’t.
if you really don’t want to invest in RAM just use a different graphical manager for the desktop (not Gnome) that uses really a small amount of resources. try - suckless dot org
Rec: Your answer seems to be at odds with why I would use a Librem laptops. As the goal is Privacy and Security, adding software from other sources, after all the effort that is made with creating Pure OS has been done.
I had to realize you were joking when you said to disable Swap. Swap is not inherently evil, it is just a sign of where computer speed might be improved by more RAM. If Swap was needed and not available, I would guess the computer would hang or crash. Another thought that Swap file might be available for someone to mine information out of my Memory. Not sure how Pure OS is designed to prevent that.
I prefer actual information, rather than seat of the pants, (4 GB’s of RAM is surely sufficient?) Using Boxes, which I am guessing use Virtualization, I have to wonder. I think some benchmark programs are reasonable to determining that.
I was talking with someone the other day, would said his computer had 6 GB of RAM for Windows 7. He is a lawyer and absolutely requires some programs that he has in Windows. He is likely correct, and to him this discussion does not matter. The thing works fast enough for what he expects. but he has no experimentation, no real fact to determine how much faster his computer can run. He is just satisfied in that it does what he expects in a time frame convenient for him.
I do not even know of benchmark programs that would work in a real world kind of way. Most benchmarks are programs to determine how fast the processor is, not to determine "real world using the internet, multiple programs open, and the specifics of the different Librem hardware configurations with Pure OS.
Your comments make me understand better what I was asking. I had not thought before of whether Swap represents a security breach before. I thank you for your concern.
for virtualisation 2GB per OS is a good start but since the librem laptops only go as far as 4cores/4threads you could say that you would only get 3 maximum virtualised OSs at any given point (each 1c/1t and that is pushing it - i wouldn’t go more than 1 or 2 simulataneously on a laptop unless it’s qubesOS).
i mean it’s probably a good idea if you leave 2c/2t + 4 GB RAM for the host OS (+50% to be safe if you use Gnome or some other heavy DE)
then you add to that sufficient RAM for 3 VMs ( 3x2gb ) - aprox 6Gb + 50% more to be safe (probably overkill for a laptop)
so in total you could say that probably 10 GB RAM at least would be an OK starting point - if not more … for a quad core librem