[svlug] Lightweight computing discussion tonight, 4/5/2023

[Akkana Peck]

Steve Litt writes:
> Sorry for the late notice. Tonight at 7:00 Eastern Daylight time,
> 4/5/2023, GoLUG is having an online meeting where we'll discuss

Darn, didn't see the note in time. Any interesting insights? I'm a longtime openbox user.

> We REALLY need people to speak on lightweight browsers, because much of
> today's bloat is because of browsers. 

I've been using qutebrowser lately. It's keyboard driven and feels fairly light (*), using the QtWebEngine framework. I use it mostly for email attachments when I need mutt to show something beyond what elinks can show in a terminal. (I'm not hardcore enough to do any actual web browsing with tty-based browsers, but I use them a lot for email.)

I used to use my own Python/QtWebEngine script, quickbrowse.py, but Qt6 changed a lot of the way QtWebEngine works without actually documenting the changes (grumble), and I haven't been able to get multiple tabs working in QT6. I hadn't heard of xxxterm (mentioned on your "deeper dive" page), but it looks interesting.

(*) I said qutebrowser "feels fairly light" because of the difficulty of figuring out how much memory Linux apps are using: I don't actually know how lightweight it is. Has there been any progress in tools that show memory use for various apps? Back when I was putting a lot of effort into finding lightweight environments (I think I gave an SVLUG talk on the subject back in the Pleistocene), measuring memory use to find out which apps really were lightweight was the most difficult part, but I haven't really looked lately. Do you know how the RAM usage numbers in that cmp-all4.png image were arrived at?

I fondly remember an old SGI app (speaking of the Pleistocene) called bloatview (the titlebar called it "Power Bloat Vision" :-) that showed a graphic view of RAM divided into how much each app was using -- kind of like gparted but for RAM. I've always wanted something like that for Linux, but Linux's memory model is a lot more complex than SGI's was, I guess, and you have to worry about things like libraries used by multiple apps.

        ...Akkana