https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X265

Don’t overcomplicate things.

Doesn’t zram compress what’s in memory so systems with less ram can work a little better? If you’ve got enough for a ramdisk you don’t need zram.

https://www.linuxbabe.com/command-line/create-ramdisk-linux

If you have enough ram you could make /var/tmp a ramdisk, every reboot will clear it then.

I did it for an old K6-2, optimizing everything possible. It was fun.

Roses are red, hope this is never real
Your brake pedal has now become your steering wheel

“Software defined vehicle”

💀

Unless you have a dedicated GPU just for the VM(s) it isn’t awesome for anything graphical, other than that it works for most things.

IMO your first plan is best given your setup. Personally I keep Windows in a VM, that way it’s entirely controlled and I don’t need to reboot.

When I moved from BeOS after they went belly up (F) I took a few concepts with me, not the least of which is ~/config and ~/config/bin the latter of which is added to $path. Highly recommend it as a place to home scripts and small compiled programs that don’t need to be system-wide.

MARCH optimisation

It was my understanding that was all but pointless to do these days.

Megabytes, a thousand of which make a gigabyte. Chrome in my machine right now is taking over one gigabyte of memory, that alone is using more than 8 times what OP wants the whole system to. It’s definitely an ask for low memory, almost embedded levels of ram.

Maybe if you asked about specific games you would get good answers…

Check out the Waydroid script I posted, it’ll help you with figuring out how to run Wayland programs.

Weston is basically Wayland within an X11 app. You can run Wayland stuff with it but it’ll be constrained to that window.

Here’s the script I use to start and stop Waydroid:

#!/bin/bash
PID=$(pgrep "weston")
if [ "$?" -eq "0" ]; then
    waydroid session stop
    kill $PID
    exit
fi
weston --width=1920 --height=1080 --socket=wayland-1 &>/dev/null &
sleep 2
WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-1 XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland waydroid show-full-ui

Change the resolution to whatever you need it to be. Run it once to start, again to stop. It just lives on my desktop.

I have waydroid working great in the latest Mint. You need Weston so Waydroid has a Wayland to connect to.

e: or use the experimental Wayland in 21.3 but it’s not ready for daily driving

It depends, is this a new install? Did you just update something?

It isn’t booting a kernel, you’re in the bootloader.

If you have an android phone it’s likely using wpa_supplicant.