Ran linux in an 8 mb 486 in the 90s. X ran in 256 color mode and twm or mwm were the window managers. It was so hard to use though. Had to setup modelines settings for your monitor in a textfile and theoretically could damage it with wrong iputs. Programming X fuggedabout it - I was from turbo borland msdos land where everything was neatly documented and designed with clear examples to make programming easy. I was lucky to get an x program to even compile. Hard to find books back then. Pre Amazon. Xv image viewer probably the only thing i used X for. Actually used the machine most of the time in the text mode terminals using alt function keys and used lynx as a browser (before javascript… but gopher was becoming obsolete at that point… ftp still popular though ) with random assortment of svgalib programs for any graphical stuff. Still there was something magical about seeing that black and white check pattern come up and the little X mouse cursor appear.. like there were… possibilities.

I am amazed to discover that Xfce of that era was so CDEsque: https://www.linux.co.cr/desktops/review/2000/xfce-3.3/help.h...

That would have been then already some kind of anachronism. 8MiB RAM was workable (but only barely so with X11) in the early nineties. Late nineties 64MiB or more were common.

Back in 1993, I remember booting SLS Linux on a 386 laptop with 3 megs of RAM (1 meg on the motherboard, 2 meg expansion.) I could barely get it to startx and open an xterm, so I mostly used it in from the console!

Before Linux, I was experimenting with Coherent.

I doesn’t feel like that long ago when I built a swarm of Arch Linux based thin clients which PXE booted from a SLES DHCP & NFS host.

That was probably around 2010 or 2015.

Those images had to run on a thin client with 512 MB RAM.

I think I chose XFCE as the DE.

A few years back, I had fun setting up an old X11 terminal I had in my rather eccentric retro computing collection.

But I don’t think I had much memory in it. I had ordered a fair bit more, but maybe only 4-8M.

I did get it to work with only minor difficulties, but man only the simplest of applications could run. The barebones basic GUI text editor that came with Ubuntu couldn’t even start up.

Me too, but I was able to do it around 1995-1996 :) Also remember Windows95 can boot with 4MB of RAM, and was decent with 12MB.

My first PC had 16 MB of RAM, which later obviously became too slow to be usable. I remember I had to wait around a minute for Fallout to load a level, which you had to do fairly frequently.

I don’t know how resolution maps to ram in x11 but I assume at least one byte per pixel. Based on that assumption, there’s no chance you’d even be able to power a 4k monitor with 8mb of ram, let alone the rest of the system.