How’s the experience? Does it choke or does it run?
I don’t have any hardware like that anymore, so my experience is limited to server / cloud use cases. For that, 2GB can be fine (depending on the needs of the specific service, of course).
For a desktop environment, 2GB is pushing it — especially if you want to run Firefox, Chrome, or any Electron app. I haven’t tried, but I expect that even with zram, it’s going to be painful. However, if you have a more lightweight use case… maybe fine.
1 Like
I run fedora on a 2GiB RPi and it is fine.
It is installed as a minimal server and the only packages installed are the ones I need to run a modest service on it.
dnf update works without issue. I have not tried a system upgrade .
1 Like
A server install is much different than an install that uses graphics and other gui apps. Glad that works for you, but a server install on arm SBC hardware is much different than a standard workstation install on x86_64 hardware. Even the kernel is much smaller for arm hardware.
Gnome needs a lot of memory. Even 4GiB is on the edge of usable. Xfce is slightly better. Running a browser also needs quite a bit of memory.
Of course gui is very different, that is why i made it clear this is a minimal server install.
If you’re wanting a Desktop Environment, you’ll be hard pressed for sure, and Gnome and KDE are both very resource hungry. But LXQT and i3 can give you a lightweight GUI and a relatively painless experience. I found the Sway variant to be faster than Gnome, but not as fast as LXQT or XFCE or LXDE, check out the Spins on the Get Fedora page.
Oh yeah go for swap on disk instead of swap on Zram, it’ll keep you from hitting the OOM killer.