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by H8crilA 20 days ago
It would make memory-poor phones more viable. Like why can't we have a 512MB, or even 256MB RAM phone. Although I doubt that the software effort would be cheaper than just buying the extra RAM. It's definitely much more uncertain.
1 comments

Those exist, they're just feature phones. Smartphones have to run general purpose apps and that takes RAM.
That was my point, make it so that apps can run on that RAM budget. At least some apps.
The OpenMoko Freerunner only had 128MB RAM, it was able to run a Linux desktop of the time, Englightenment/E16. There were lots of apps for it too. IIRC the cut down QtMoko distro ran best though.

https://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo_Freerunner https://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Applications https://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/QtMoko

Before that Linux ran on the Zaurus too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_Zaurus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenZaurus