Debian 12 (Bookworm)

One slight drawback to Debian 12 it seems to use about 1.5 times the ram of Bullseye.
 
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This is a big NO for my 4g ram laptops, Cinnamon uses that much too or only KDE?
 
I have only tested KDE. I would think XFCE or Mate might be less.
I Suspect gnome would be worse but haven't tried it.
 
Been using Debian Bookworm 12 for a couple weeks now it works great here. And yes, Chris it now comes with non-free firmware and drivers for most devices. So works out of the box for me. There are those who of course decry the move but in the long run it will make Debian more appealing to the newbies and oldies alike :)
There's already a reaction to that:


Otherwise there's Devuan and Trisquel depending on sensibilities.
 
Best way to see if it fits your needs, try it out. :)
That is the plan. I doubt I will notice any real differences between Debian 12 and Debian 11. Debian 11 is still "current" until the end of the day, I guess. :)

I am experimenting with Debian as a potential future desktop. I use ordinary, mature, well-tested services and features in my Debian servers. I doubt anything I run on Debian 12 will go through poorly tested code paths, but I do not plan to update anything important for a while. That is one important reason why Debian 11 is still maintained and supported.

I know what these kind of releases feel like. It is a combination of utter exhaustion coupled with a weird combination of excitement and dread. Half of you wants the entire world to see it and try it out and use it and be excited and happy. Right NOW! The other half of you wants the take-up to be a very slow ramp, so you are not surprised by THE bug with a bizarre corner case that QA missed but has a subtle widespread side effect. Those kinds of bugs can drag everyone back in the middle of the night. You have to deal with it without compromising release quality. The "tiger team" starts to address the bug while everyone else drains a quick cup of coffee and dives in to help customer support or pitch in wherever needed.

... Big releases can be very stressful and challenging, but there is an unmatched reward that comes from working with great people and making great stuff, too. By the way, I never stayed up an entire night without sleep when I was young or even in college. I always managed to grab a couple hours of sleep. The first time I ever stayed up all night was the night of a problematic major product release.

In the free software world, someone probably finds the bug and suggests a fix in half an hour. :-(

P.S. I want to say something about great teams and leadership, too.
After that problematic release when I was treated to my first all-nighter, the company leadership rewarded everyone for their hard work. What impressed me most was that they also recognized and rewarded the families of the employees. Those families had worked very hard on the release too - sacrificing their loved ones' time and taking on a lot of the work at home so that we could get that release out the door. It was a great place to work, with great people. May you be so fortunate to have a few experiences like that too.
 
This is a big NO for my 4g ram laptops, Cinnamon uses that much too or only KDE?
It's a shame. The other day I tested with Spiral Linux with Cinnamon D.E., which had only one great problem: using the CTRL key in a favorite Windows program with Wine. The key was totally dead. So that time I installed a distro I decided to raise it to "Bookworm" status. Got something that was the same desktop less attractive than eg. Ubuntu Cinnamon, and Nemo holding up many times while navigating directories. It didn't have the CTRL key problem anymore. I should have investigated how much RAM it required, but I believed I could do better than that. Did the same thing earlier with GNOME and LXQt but the RAM consumption should be the same or higher. Didn't like LXQt, kept GNOME so far.

With KDE you have to watch out for "baloo" system search service, suddenly that could go crazy gobbling up RAM and CPU time, and in the least could create a file on disk as large as 2GB. :O This happened to me when I started using Spiral KDE last year installed to the groaning internal HDD of my computer.

I will report how much RAM is consumed by my XFCE example that has been around longer.
 
Reported by "XFCE Task Manager":

  • Using GIMP: 1.3GB
  • Using Mousepad (to compose this post): nearly 800MB
  • Opened Firefox v114 AppImage with Mousepad: 1.2GB
  • Closed Mousepad, then opened "linux-dot-org" site with sub-forum list: 1.2GB, less than above.

Maybe "Bullseye" had the same memory consumption.

It was on this distro:
 
I'm trying to find which ISO I got this "Bookworm Testing" from. It might be the following, but the ISO is dated just after Thanksgiving. Only if I could remember when in December I downloaded the ISO. Don't click any links inside (Web Archive) here:


I have a bunch of system files dated 3-Jan-2023.
 

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And yes, Chris it now comes with non-free firmware and drivers for most devices. So works out of the box for me.

Thanks for the heads up, Dave :)

Avagudweegend
 
After yesterdays updates Bookworm KDE is now using 1.2gbs with just the desktop up and a few background programs running. 1.7 gbs with Vivaldi up with one tab running. So it's on par with other DE's. But if you have limited ram I would opt for a lighter DE than gnome or KDE.
 

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