BunsenLabs put on a lot of weight since Crunchbang and doesn’t support HiDPI out of the box. But there are other options.

When I had a laptop from Walmart that cost me $599 in 2004 and switched to GNU/Linux from Windows XP, I initially used Mandriva One. (While my desktops in that era generally ran Ubuntu or some flavor of Solaris/OpenSolaris once I could get my hands on that as well.)

(Mandriva no longer exists, but there are plenty of perfectly good distributions that go on, including a fork called Mageia by some ex employees. Nothing gets lost. No efforts that anyone cares about get wasted, in Free and Open Source Software.)

Mandriva had different editions. They had one with a bunch of “value-added” stuff and a nice box (or you could download it) called the PowerPack Edition, and it threw in some proprietary software with a license, and came set up to use proprietary graphics drivers and Adobe Flash, which were more important back then than they are now.

They also produced a one CD version called One that was a Live CD, like Ubuntu had introduced, or a traditional DVD set that you could download and burn without most of the paid-for proprietary software included.

Since I didn’t need anything except ATI’s (surprisingly crappier than Nvidia) FGLRX graphics driver, which AMD shot and then replaced with open source goodness after the takeover for later cards, I chose Mandriva One with GNOME.

But over the years, GNOME packed on the pounds until my laptop, with its Sempron 3000+ and 1 GB of RAM just could not run it anymore. At least not if you wanted to do anything with the laptop.

I went looking around for replacements, and although (back then) there were a few “lightweight” desktops, none of them saved me enough RAM to be worth trying to use.

In fact, the laptop would have been thrown out years sooner had it not been for Crunchbang. A Debian-derivative that didn’t have the friendliest graphical interface, but it had enough to get things done.

I could load Firefox, edit documents, and run MP3 files. And frankly, the fact that it kept it going into the 2010s was impressive. In fact, I was still using it daily until it died on me halfway into the decade.

Crunchbang used less than 50 MB of RAM on boot, so it was worth putting up with some aggravations like not having a full fat desktop with all the “bling bling”.

Much changes in the world, but with a new version of Windows upon us it’s worth mentioning that the past is prologue and there’s going to be a lot of people out there, many with expensive computers that are not terribly old, who have been shut out from running Windows 11.

(Windows “11” is basically a Windows 10 with lipstick, more spyware, and more broken applications, and less hardware compatibility merely to force upgrades….but The Verge has been paid off to skip over this and talk about what flavor of ice cream Microsoft is buying for the office party….)

The same thing keeps getting repeated over and over in the Windows world, and Vista was the worst one up until that point, so when I saw how easy Mandriva was, I bolted.

Because HP sent me a free “Windows Vista Home Basic” update CD.

It took hours to install, it made my laptop that had at least ran Windows XP China Syndrome, and then after taking about 12 minutes to boot up, it barely ran at all. Microsoft and HP had marketed the laptop as “Vista Capable”, and yes, people filed lawsuits over that whole “Capable” marketing when many other people had the same experience I did on their computer.

Oh, and Microsoft had the same paid-for press nonsense going on then as now.

In fact, the disaster was so epic that Microsoft had to trick people into using it in a focus group, on powerful and expensive PCs where Microsoft picked all of the hardware themselves. Not the slow, crashy, unstable mess that people in the real world were trying to install on the PC they already had.

Yesterday I loaded the live USB for BunsenLabs, which is the “successor” in spirit, to Crunchbanng. Just curious to see if that “spirit” lived on.

Right off the bat, I noticed the relatively (compared to GNOME or KDE) unfriendly GUI they had made with OpenBox and a small assortment of odd programs that I honestly had neither the time or interest in figuring out how to use on a modern laptop that can run, well, anything really. Maybe I’m just spoiled now.

One feature it kept from Crunchbang is that an applet tells you on the desktop how much RAM is in use. Nearly 700 MB on boot! With nothing else running.

That compares to an average modern KDE distribution to about 900 MB and about 1.5 GB for GNOME. (This for Debian 11, based on my observations.)

So not only is BunsenLabs user-unfriendly, it’s also not saving you enough resources over KDE that it’s going to matter.

For that matter, both my laptops, even the 2016 one, have 16 GB of RAM, and that’s an insane amount for GNU/Linux.

Pretty much the reason this is becoming standard is that Windows just keeps packing on bloatware that’s completely useless, and 16 GB is pretty much the minimum you need just to do normal tasks in Windows now (despite what some people say, even 8 is unpleasant, and 4 is downright painful in Windows).

(In fact, even on a Tiger Lake i7-1165G7 with Iris Xe graphics, Windows is so unpleasant that it still manages to add jank that you can feel when you run a web browser such as Firefox or Vivaldi, which simply isn’t a problem in GNU/Linux on the same hardware.)

I couldn’t figure out how to do scaling on my Yoga 900 ISK2’s HiDPI display under BunsenLabs, or even if that was possible, so after squinting to make anything out, I finally just shut the laptop off.

This wouldn’t have been a problem on most laptops because they have a 1920×1080 display or less.

In fact, once I saw the horrific HiDPI display scaling problems with most GNU/Linux desktop environments, and Windows to a lesser extent, I swore I’d never buy another HiDPI laptop.

They’re an extra strain on the GPU, they use more power, you’ll never run much on them at their native resolution, and they’re just honestly not that important.

GNOME is the only desktop that actually supports them properly out of the box, and that’s why I got so used to GNOME on Fedora and carried over using GNOME on this PC.

Much of the work on proper scaling support was Canonical, because hey, open source. Everyone has an itch to scratch and at the end of the day, hopefully problems get solved.

I doubt Red Hat ever would have looked into this. How many corporate laptops, or headless servers, are going to benefit from HiDPI displays that basically Macs and a few PCs have in them?

In closing, Bunsenlabs is just not a distribution I can say I recommend.

It’s not enough of a RAM savings that anything remotely modern will benefit too much from, and if you’re under that much memory pressure, you should probably look into setting up a KDE distribution with ZSwap in play.

I can’t see the reason to recommend a desktop with less features, or one with a higher learning curve, or one that they’re just shoving all of GNOME into anyway to a person when they ask what can be done for an older system.

I do think the fact that nobody is worried about doing better than KDE is, is a little concerning, but it’s nowhere near as bad as the situation on Windows. Since Microsoft considers a 3 year old PC ancient trash, and your RAM modules are soldered in, good luck trying to upgrade that. But moving over to a nice efficient GNU/Linux distribution is one way to buck the trend in software bloat.