Burning ISO flash drive seems problematic?

[az2020]

One question, besides a terminal, were those systems running any other programs? or just booted and idle? If the latter they seem quite high.

Just booted and idle. If you look at the PDF or spreadsheet, it describes the "process" I tried to follow in order to measure the same thing with each distro. It's not a perfect science because on some distros the memory used can fluctuate. Usually it would stabilize after a few minutes. I should probably have a fixed 15-minute wait & measure. The way I waited until I saw stability might be arbitrary.

I think the numbers for the virtual machines should be reproducible. But, they don't reflect being installed on real hardware which should have higher memory use because of real drivers working with real hardware. A vm is a simplified environment, and should be the same on any machine. But, when a distro is installed on real hardware, I don't think those numbers are comparable across machines. I think my numbers on the Ryzen 3 3200u are higher than someone would have on 5-year old budget Toshiba. My laptop has more/newer things. More drivers, larger drivers. I assume.

So, the vm comparisons should be representative of how the distros compare in an ideal environment (but not real-world). And then, the real-hardware comparisons are representative of what happened on *my* machine (but, not representative of your machine).

I think it's fun to do those speed-dating installs. I don't know why. It's just fun to visit with a distro for 2-4 hours, move on to the next one. You get initial impressions without delving deeper into it. It's like travelling abroad. I feel enriched somehow. I'll probably do it again this summer after the 20.04 distros are out.