I get how this could be interpreted as offensive, but I think it is just poorly worded.

This option is for if you are using a legacy version of Linux such as 2.6.x (eg, on an old RedHat distro that your business systems are designed to be run on).

This enables a compatibility mode so the old kernels don’t complain.

Kind of. Think of the RAM allowance as a “maximum” limit, not a reserved allocation. The VM host might have 64 GB RAM, and perhaps allows 20 VMS running in it at once. Each VM can allocate up to a max of 8GB from that host. Not everyone is running their VM at the same time, even if they are, not everyone would be running at their limit of 8GB of memory. If it does happen that 20 users are trying to use 8GB at the same time on one host, then it’s the same as anytime an OS runs low on RAM, it would start paging out to disk, everything would slow down for everyone. If that happens too many times, they could shuffle some users’ VMs around to balance the loads across hosts.

Can someone explain to me why it always seems like everyone on lemmy are in one of these two categories:

1: “I remember my first computer used ferro-magnetic beads that we glued to lengths of string. We could store nearly 10 bytes in one string”.

2: “My first computer was an old iPad that only had 64GB storage, couldn’t even store my photo album.”

It’s like everyone is aged either 89 or 19, nobody in between.

Probably because the RAM was pooled, but storage was not. So your RAM allocation is part of a larger pool that is shared between all currently logged in users. But your storage is allocated/reserved up front, and is used only by you.

+1 for XPipe. This is pretty much exactly what OP is asking for. It also does SSH tunneling, SSH reverse-tunneling, manages connections into containers, and many other things. I’m a big fan.

Thanks for the reminder, I always forget about this feature, I should use it more.

The term Display Manager is a vestige of the use of X11.

X11 is a Server/Client protocol.

When a user logs in to an XServer, they are given an Xsession. The user can use that Xsession to create one or more X11 Displays (they are just IDs). The X11 Display ID is passed to the X11 client application (that’s what the XDISPLAY environment variable is for). The client apps render their content to that Display ID. This whole thing allows for more than one user to be able to use a single operating system on a single XServer at the same time.

All of that is pretty cumbersome for a user to do themselves in their terminal, that’s what Display Managers are for. They:

• Start the XServer if it isn’t started yet
• Provide a method (eg, login with username and password), to start a new XSession.
• Use that XSession to create an empty X11 Display.
• Look up which is your configured default DE or WM
• Launch the DE or WM with the right parameters, passing it the new XSession and XDisplay

If you’re using Wayland, then the architecture is very different. The Display Manager then simply operates as a login screen.