this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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That is still comically high. Arch Linux with DWM gets 100 mb, I've seen gentoo builds with DWM get as low as 40 mb.
KDE looks better than windows and it gets a third of the ram idle usage at most.
Idle RAM usage means literally nothing.
Unless you don't have a lot of ram and don't want to spill over into swap?
Aside from that, why would you say that? So if it idled at 8 GB of ram (which it is on its way to eventually doing) would you still say that?
Do you have any idea how ridiculous of a concept it is that a clean operating system alone idles alone on 4gb of ram? What in the hell are the services doing that would make it idle that high? The bloat stacks too you know, if the code that is used to run services in an operating system is inefficient, it will get proportionally worse the more services and programs you open up.
That has nothing to do with idle RAM. If you are swapping while idle, you have HORRIBLY fucked up. RAM usage is (and should be) determined by memory pressure. When idling, there should be none.
Yes. Idle RAM usage means nothing. You need to measure how much it contributes to memory pressure.
No.
Preloading and caching in otherwise wasted space.
Memory pressure? You mean niceness?
Niceness just gives a program a higher CPU (and thus, RAM) priority.
Your system is still going to swap. The idling ram doesn't magically go away. That's how it works. If it didn't, you start experiencing bugs, crashes, and data loss, because there is no more room in the pool.
Just because a computer is "idle" doesn't mean it isn't doing anything, it is still performing work to stay on, composite your window manager, display it, run services in the background. Those services are still programs that are often vital to the operating system actually functioning, you can't just make that utilization magically disappear because you need more RAM because they tend to have lower niceness values than programs in userspace, even Windows understands that.
Yes, if you are swapping at idle then you indeed did do something horribly wrong, it is a bit comical that you don't realize that proves my point. The explorer.exe devs indeed did something horribly wrong, they released shitty half baked code because managers think more code = harder/better work when it is actually the reverse.
I've never seen windows idle that much from a clean install.
Exactly. Every time before I found out about LTSB and these scripts my idle usage wasn't lower than 3-3.6gb. I went through all those running processes and said myself that there has to be better way. (And boy how I was pissed off when I found out about the telemetry..) It led me to Linux, but sometimes I need to use Windows so I have dual-boot with LTSB.
Not really. I can see why you'd think that but you just compile a kernel that supports what you need. A kernel customized for your hardware can be less than half the size of the default kernel, it's just that it may function ONLY on that hardware.
You're missing the point here. That is to save at best 60 mb. Arch with KDE still maxes out at like 500 mb of usage.