>>965
I can't help you with the memory usages of those OSes, but I would say that at one point, I got down to 60 mb on an x86 Debian GNU/Linux (before Ian died) with X and running openbox and urxvt. x64 is at least double that with a similar barebones setup (very little background resources) for some dumbfuck reason that I have no idea why. I'd blame the hardware first, kernel second, OS third, yourself fourth, and some crackers fifth. They really just don't make things the way they used to anymore

more rack-space. More machines.

64bit, less asm, more library bloat, more security and less on disk/swap.

Macintosh OS 7.0 (1991) runs in 2MB of memory with GUI
Macintosh OS 9.22 (2001) runs in 68.2MB of memory with GUI+TCP on G4 800 MHz

Inferno runs on stock Nintendo DS Lite with 4 MB RAM, but it can run on even smaller hardware.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_os

There's a cut-down version of Linux that runs on the RC2014 Z80 SBC, which IIRC has only 512 KB of RAM. Demonstration here:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=1WG8zopGzaA
Watch his other videos too, they're pretty nice. I'm just not that crazy about Linux anymore though, and run OpenBSD on my laptop, but I'm not even too crazy about OpenBSD. It's gotten quite bloated as well. It used to run fine on Motorola 68030 systems (like Amiga, Atari ST, old Macs, etc.), but they abandonned those machines years ago. Anyway for the RC2014 I think CP/M makes the most sense, and you could probably code a TCP/IP stack for that. After all, they managed to do it with a Commodore 64 that has much less memory:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LUnix

Here's another guy with some interesting videos about making custom computers with old processors and not much memory.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=BP7sjnVzTqw

BTW CP/M itself will run fine on an 8080 or Z80 computer with just 64 KB RAM. The RC2014 is really souped-up compared to the stuff from the 80's.

A stock Amiga 1000 has only 256 KB RAM but still runs a full multitasking OS with GUI. Ditto with the original Atari ST. I consider them to be the last of the interesting machines. There was much more impressive stuff that came after (SGI Indigo, etc.) but nothing as tightly designed and affordable.

After a fresh install of Parabola GNU/linux using OpenRC
$ free -h
Uses 100MB after booting into the console after login in text mode.

Using the parabola kernel to boot a stage 3 hardened Gentoo environment.
Uses 65MB after login in text mode.

>>965
I use XP Pro 32 bit as a daily driver (gaming mostly) and I optimized it somewhat to get 167MB used at boot. On a normal system with less optimization would be ~180MB used. After a few days of use it sits around 250MB, largely due to caching.

My Debian stable (Jessie) 32bit file server only uses around 55MB idle (no x, just ftp). My desktop machine before it died ran Devuan testing 32 bit which used around 80MB at boot without X running. I only used icewm on it though. I could get it lower by compiling my own kernel, but not really worth the hassle.

The main problem with Linux nowadays is when you install large DE's like KDE/Gnome/whatever you end up with a bunch of unnecessary desktop related services installed even with X stopped. 64bit should add some memory usage, but not the large numbers I am seeing.

Unfortunately my FreeDOS rig is down at the moment otherwise I would get you memory figures from it. Memory usage with networking would be troublesome though due to pretty much every packet driver using different amounts of memory depending on how good the NIC vendor is about optimization. I have seen some packet drivers using less than 20K, but others nearly 80K, and thats just the hardware I have laying around. As for running a GUI on such a system, OpenGem would be what I would test with (pic related), but Arachne while ultimately just a web browser lets you do many filesystem functions with it.

I had Win2000 for years but I cannot recall the memory usage from it offhand. I just remember I was able to get it to run on a machine with 32MB of ram without drastic performance issues at one point. I think the numbers were comparable to my stripped down XP install though.

At least for a start, it would probably be helpful to know the minimum requirements of 95/98/ME until someone comes up with hard figures.
95: 386DX with 4MB (8MB recommended) ram
98: 486DX/66Mhz (Pentium recommended), 16MB ram (24 recommended)
ME: Pentium 150Mhz (Pentium II 350Mhz recommended), 32MB ram (64MB recommended)

From personal experience, 95 and 98 benefited greatly from 512MB of ram if you had it. 98 (not sure about 95 but i'd assume so) needs a patch to see more than 1GB. WinME on the other hand really needed 1GB+ before it was happy, otherwise you could expect frequent bsod's.

>>965

>why the hell does Linux need 150MB to start up and release a console to me?

"Linux" doesn't. Parabola does. Maybe Parabola sucks. I dunno. I just checked my Slackware installation:

Without X: 54 MiB
With X & a lightweight window manager: 83 MiB

It could be lower, too, but I am running a number of daemons like ntpd and sshd, and I recompiled those that don't come compiled with hardening flags by default. Usually, that means they take more memory. The tradeoff is better security.

>>990

>Inferno runs on stock Nintendo DS Lite with 4 MB RAM, but it can run on even smaller hardware.

This expands dong. I've always wanted to try Inferno, but never got around to it.

>>965
>OpenBSD 6.1 starts in text mode command line in 27MB of memory
Uses less than that for me.
This depends on architecture, with amd64 and i386 being some of the most memory using ones.

>>1005

I trust FreeDOS more than I trust GNU/Linux. Get your system back up and running. I used to run this on a Pentium III system but it corupted the file system twice in a row after copying some files into the games directory. I Wiped and reinstalled, and tried it again same result. So I stopped using it, and started using MS DOS instead. But that aside I think that FreeDOS and OpenGEM have a real future. I think that FreeDOS should be an important part of the private computing future. They just need to port a heavy duty file encryption program to the base system and I'm sure gpg is already ported. When you get your system back up please post the memory usage results. Thanks!

>>1008
The machine I used is a SunBlade 150 UltraSparc IIi 550MHz computer from 2003.

I don't want to sound cliché but I suspect great part of the RAM in parabola is thanks to systemd.

Don't give up on GNU/Linux, there are some distros that take it to extremes to cut the packages to minimum. Source Mage in particular has the philosophy of only including what you want, nothing more, and the sources are clean and untouched. I don't have access to my installation but as soon as I get it I will post results, meanwhile look at how some guy went to have a graphical environment with 97MB.

Fresh install of Parabola/GNU/Linux-Libre/OpenRC

On an Intel core2 laptop

boot into cli from OpenRC

$ free -h

used 60 MB

start xorg as root

# startx

# free -h

used 75 MB

That's much more reasonable. Goodbye systemd.

Once I have everything working I'm going to backup my desktop and nuke it. It has Intel ME so I'll put parabola Open RC base onto it with Xorg and use it with mpv and retroarch, for streaming and gaming. I'll use other alternative hardware for more important / less resource intensive activities. I like the memory usage from OpenBSD 6.3 more (27MB in cli after boot), and MS DOS 6.22 (348 KB) even more. Less things running in memory means a better chance of being clean.

I have a retail box of MS DOS 5 from the early 90s on 5.25" floppies, before the advent of the internet(its clean). MS DOS has no security, it's security is the physical security on my front door, but it's clean so that gives me privacy (unless I install malware); it's a pain to setup though, everything is manual configuration, that's the down side.

Alpine Linux on OpenRC
Fresh install on encrypted lvm with the services it said to start in the wiki guide. In command line on busybox.
$ free -m
120MB.

I couldn't get X org to start, but it would probably add another 20MB on top of that.

Hyperbola with linux-libre-lts on OpenRC is similar to parabola. Boots into user account in command line in at around 100MB xorg adds another 20MB ontop to around 120MB. Booting into a user shell seems to be more memory expensive than starting as root.

I want to boot to command line in no more than 20MB with a GUI that brings me up to no more than 40-50MB of memory usage. Any more than that and there is too much going on.

Gentoo Linux (2021)
Gentoo Hardened 10.3.0-r2
Linux/x86 5.13.10-gentoo Kernel

text mode: 51 MiB

Fresh install running with Btrfs on LVM on LUKS. Hardened Gentoo amd64 no-multilib stage 3,70 packages emerged. Running dm-crypt, iptables, lvm and bash. Could probably trim it down to 40MiB with some other choices (shell, daemons etc). I think this is going to be as good as it gets for Linux (for me) without changing things drastically. Maybe I'll switch my shell to ksh or dash or something else and see how it performs.

MacOS HighSierra (2017)

Installed on a MacMini 2011 with 16GB RAM, fresh install:

PhysMem: 4981M used (1945M wired)

The system needs at least 5GB to run properly, and uses up to 10-14GB of RAM when using applications. The memory usage is similar on Monterey.