Old Dell notebook with Q4OS 1.8 "Orion" TDE

FlexQ4 · 2026-02-03 15:03

Yesterday i found an old Dell notebook with Q4OS 1.8 "Orion" TDE in the attic.
From about 2016 - my first installation of Q4. It booted up well and i clicked on the conky-icon:
it stated a memory consumtion of 120 MiB.
My current config (4.12 / TDE) - visually not to seperate, even at a second look - consumes about 600 MiB of mem after startup (likewise according to conky).
That is 5 times more - i hope the version of 2036 won't consume 3 GiB! :-)

q4osteam · 2026-02-03 16:19

That's odd. Our testing installation of 64bit Q4OS 4.13 Trinity with basic profile consumes 250MB of RAM after startup according to htop. We would guess, it's something wrong with Conky on your Q4OS 4 setup.

FlexQ4 · 2026-02-03 17:21

Yes, 360 MiB according to htop here. But about 600 MiB according to

$ ps -eo size,pid,user,command --sort -size | awk '{ hr=$1/1024 ; printf("%13.2f Mb ",hr) } \
 { for ( x=4 ; x<=NF ; x++ ) { printf("%s ",$x) } print "" }' | cut -d "" -f2 | cut -d "-" -f1 | less 
         0,00 Mb COMMAND
        99,66 Mb /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg
        42,60 Mb /usr/libexec/udisks2/udisksd
        39,31 Mb /usr/bin/pulseaudio
        33,85 Mb /usr/sbin/ModemManager
        33,63 Mb /lib/systemd/systemd
        33,24 Mb /usr/libexec/at
        26,45 Mb /usr/sbin/NetworkManager
        25,17 Mb /usr/libexec/polkitd
        24,96 Mb /usr/libexec/geoclue
        18,85 Mb /opt/trinity/bin/kdesktop
        18,66 Mb (sd
        18,63 Mb polkit
        18,48 Mb /sbin/init
        18,33 Mb /opt/trinity/bin/artsd
        18,22 Mb /usr/sbin/rsyslogd
        17,98 Mb /usr/sbin/cups
        17,07 Mb /usr/bin/python3 /usr/share/unattended
        16,38 Mb kmix
         8,78 Mb /lib/systemd/systemd
         7,23 Mb /usr/sbin/cupsd
         7,16 Mb konsole [tdeinit]
         7,04 Mb tdenetworkmanager [tdeinit]
         6,98 Mb kicker [tdeinit]
         6,41 Mb tderandrtray
         6,09 Mb kded [tdeinit]
         5,90 Mb ksmserver [tdeinit]
         4,95 Mb twin [tdeinit]
         4,72 Mb kxkb [tdeinit]
         4,55 Mb klipper [tdeinit]
         4,17 Mb knotify [tdeinit]
         3,48 Mb ksensors
         3,43 Mb kaccess [tdeinit]
         3,00 Mb tdeio_system [tdeinit] system /tmp/tdesocket
         2,86 Mb tdeio_media [tdeinit] media /tmp/tdesocket
         2,85 Mb tdelauncher [tdeinit]
         2,82 Mb /lib/systemd/systemd
         2,76 Mb tdeio_file [tdeinit] file /tmp/tdesocket
         2,76 Mb tdeio_file [tdeinit] file /tmp/tdesocket
         2,76 Mb tdeio_file [tdeinit] file /tmp/tdesocket
         2,73 Mb [tdeinit] tdeinit Running...
         2,66 Mb /opt/trinity/bin/kdesktop_lock
         2,50 Mb /lib/systemd/systemd
         2,10 Mb dcopserver [tdeinit]
         1,73 Mb /opt/trinity/bin/tdeinit_phase1
         1,62 Mb compton
         1,49 Mb /home/me/Develop/trayLoad
         1,38 Mb /usr/bin/dbus
         1,23 Mb ps
         1,13 Mb /lib/systemd/systemd
         1,00 Mb /sbin/wpa_supplicant
         0,93 Mb /usr/libexec/bluetooth/bluetoothd
         0,91 Mb

q4osteam · 2026-02-03 19:43

Where did you get the "600 MiB" value ?

FlexQ4 wrote:

... i found an old Dell notebook with Q4OS 1.8 "Orion" TDE in the attic.

Is it 32bit Q4OS 1.8 ? If so, the memory usage is perfectly consistent with our second test of 32bit Q4OS 4.13, which consumes 160MB of memory after startup according to htop. The difference of 40MB may be well explained by newer Linux kernel requirements. In general, 32-bit Linux systems consume significantly less RAM than their 64-bit counterparts.

FlexQ4 · 2026-02-03 21:23

q4osteam wrote:

Where did you get the "600 MiB" value ?

I summed up the values of the ps command above.
And: ahh yes, forgot to mention that the 1.8 system indeed was a 32bit!
I'll run that ps on th 1.8-32 by occasion. Just for curiosity, how much mem eg. '/usr/lib/xorg/Xorg' etc. consume there...

q4osteam · 2026-02-03 21:48

FlexQ4 wrote:

That is 5 times more - i hope the version of 2036 won't consume 3 GiB! :-)

There must be some failure in this measurement process. We can only confirm that 32-bit Q4OS 4.13 consumes 160 MB of memory, so it follows that Q4OS-4 consumes about 1,3 times more memory than Q4OS-1, which is more than acceptable

If you would design some reproducible method of measure step by step, we could proceed it and post a valuable result here.

q4osteam · 2026-02-04 16:56

Based on your input, we conducted testing of memory usage across 32-bit Q4OS versions. https://www.q4os.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=5943

FlexQ4 · 2026-02-04 17:32

Very nice - thank you!
i am/was allways a fan of the 32bit world, enough for my needs, a 32KB Computer sufficed to fly to the moon and back.
https://img.blick.ch/incoming/15412468- … mdensity=1
But for some reasons the train went further and quicker towards 64bit.
Somehow pleased to see the rising of the price of RAM-bars nowadays - caused by the insane greed for memory.

Q4OS Forum

#1 2026-02-03 15:03

Old Dell notebook with Q4OS 1.8 "Orion" TDE

#2 2026-02-03 16:19

Re: Old Dell notebook with Q4OS 1.8 "Orion" TDE

#3 2026-02-03 17:21

Re: Old Dell notebook with Q4OS 1.8 "Orion" TDE

#4 2026-02-03 19:43

Re: Old Dell notebook with Q4OS 1.8 "Orion" TDE

#5 2026-02-03 21:23

Re: Old Dell notebook with Q4OS 1.8 "Orion" TDE

#6 2026-02-03 21:48

Re: Old Dell notebook with Q4OS 1.8 "Orion" TDE

#7 2026-02-04 16:56

Re: Old Dell notebook with Q4OS 1.8 "Orion" TDE

#8 2026-02-04 17:32

Re: Old Dell notebook with Q4OS 1.8 "Orion" TDE

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