16 November 2022

There are many linux distributions out there! I’ve tested some of the full-featured Debian/Ubuntu based to compare them to try to find which one consumes less memory, at least running in a virtual machine.

In this page

• Introduction
• Comparison
• Specifications

Introduction

Why Debian/Ubuntu based? Developing under Windows (RAD Studio and Visual Studio) sometimes you want to test how your project performs or looks in linux. For these scenario, a virtual machine where you can easily install PAServer or mono helps a lot. And you don’t want that virtual machine to take much memory from your physical machine…

Comparison

Here’s a chart comparing the memory taken in the latest tested distributions:

Here the Historic:

Specifications

Trying to be as fair as possible, I’m always installing the machines into a virtual machine under a Windows 10 x64.
I don’t apply updates to compare how distributions were at their time.
I set the display resolution to 1280x800.

Programs open:

• File explorer: Home
• Terminal: htop

Before 2020, these were the programs opened. I simplified that because in some versions the system monitor or firefox takes a lot of memory:

• File explorer: Home
• Terminal: uname -a
• System Monitor
• LibreOffice Writter with a blank document
• Firefox: w3schools.com (found google.com takes a looot or CPU in some cases)

The physical machine:

• CPU: Intel i7 4771
• Motherboard: Gigabyte Z87-HD3
• Memory: 2x8GB DDR3 Corsair
• GPU: GeForce GTX 760

The virtual machine:

• Memory: 2GB
• CPU: 2
• Screen
  • Memory: 128MB
  • 3D acceleration: activated where possible
• Disk: 100GB