this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
2964 points (97.4% liked)

Linux

48332 readers
819 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Perpetual software bloat should not be encouraged; idling at 2GB is fucking insane

[–] [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.

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

Compared to what? And based on what advancement of technology and software? What should it take? Cause we can strip features all day long until we get there.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Compared to Linux which idle at half a gig with the most bloated DE. Hell, even Mac isn't that bad.

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

Cause we can strip features all day long until we get there.

Good? Okay? We need more minimalism

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's an opinion, your OS can have whatever you want with however much bloat you want your hardware to have to handle.

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

your OS can have whatever you want with however much bloat you want

No, it can't, because you can't remove the bloat, dummy, that's the entire point of the problem. People wouldn't care if they could just remove the bullshit.

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

You want a Linux install to take up less RAM? Install a lightweight distro like Endeavor or regular Arch and go with an absolutely minimal build.

You want that with Windows? There are ISO's that have Cortana and other preinstalled bloatware already removed, etc. Or you can do the same with PowerShell post-install.

The more I hear Linux purists talk the more it's clear their knowledge of windows is either incredibly basic with no attempt to actually learn or fifteen years out of date. Usually both.