this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Really? My arch install is idling at 2.8gb. Picom (310mb), XOrg (160mb) and pipewire (140mb) are big chunks, and kitty isn't cheap either but the rest is mainly sub 50mb services that all add up. I'm not running anything heavy like Gnome or KDE either, just bspwm and 2 polybar instances (one for each monitor).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah that sounds fishy, a default KDE installation of Fedora would at least be under a gig for me

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Depends on settings and the amount of availlable RAM. Install fedora KDE spin on three systems, one with 4GB, one with 8 and one with say 16GBs of RAM. You should see, that the vanilla install of KDE uses different amounts of RAM on each system. KDE uses caching of all kinds of stuff to make the overall experience smoother. The amount and aggressivenes of the caching depends on distribution defaults. And KDE using, say, 8GB of RAM when idling isn't bad. RAM is only useful, when it is used. When memory pressure increases (applications are actively using lots of RAM), KDE will automatically reduce cache sizes to free the RAM up again.

The entire notion of the system using as little RAM as possible is really weird and usually (imho) shows that people who say that don't understand how the RAM is used. I want my system to make good use of my RAM, and as much of that as is reasonable.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Damn, you said it better than I could have. Unused RAM is like unused screen space.

Bragging you have three monitors but have mastered Alt-Tab and don't use them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

My fedora install idles at about 1.5GB.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How heavy is your kitty? It usually averages at 40-45 Mb on a new window for me (with custom zsh with starship and some plugins, and customised neofetch)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah that's weird, after a systemctl soft-reboot, both picom and xorg's memory usage is way down. Either way, it's still not that unreasonable to see Windows idling at 2GB.