On Thu, Dec 10, 2020 at 02:42:30PM -0500, Steve Litt wrote:

> Wait a minute. When you say "without GUI", do you mean no X installed,
> or do you mean it lacks the display manager to boot directly into X?
> The former precludes desktop use; the latter is how I use my computer
> every day, because startx and .xinitrc are my friends.

Don't forget xdm, which ends up being what I use. I've never been keen on
leaving a console sitting there logged in but largely forgotten just for
startx, as someone could change to it and take advantage of it being
somewhat vulnerable. But there are practical reasons to consider xdm.

In terms of weight, compare:

$ ps -uq 3944
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root      3944  0.0  0.0  16396  2016 ?        Ss   Dec09   0:00 /usr/bin/xdm
$ ps -uq 6181
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
mason     6181  0.0  0.0   7916  4140 pts/9    Ss+  Dec09   0:00 -bash

xdm is taking less than half the resident memory of a bash shell, so if you
have to pick one of them to sit in the background doing nothing once it's
facilitated, xdm consumes fewer resources.

Also, for laughs, in Beowulf, the xdm binary consumes 117K on disk, versus
1.2M for bash. But this of course doesn't matter much, because deleting
bash to save space is somewhat unlikely. Following the trail, though, dash
consumes 119K on disk. Climbing up to the level of usable user shells, mksh
consumes 275K on disk. (I can't seem to get myself to stick with tcsh long
enough to call it usable, although I know some folks love it. But for
completeness: 415K)

-- 
Mason Loring Bliss    mason@???
They also surf, who only stand on waves.