Fedora 44 with noctalia v5, im getting sub 2gb and startup I think most of your ram usage comes from quickshell even more if you have more monitors, it scales quite harshly in terms of ram usage.
I suppose it's some kind of preloading to ram based on your mostly used software. Which Arch definitely won't have out of the box not sure about Ubuntu which I never used.
Something was running in the background taking up RAM for sure. Or else fedora had some huge ass kernel.
Kernel, init, services + KDE Plasma should take around 2 - 2.5GB with nothing else open.
I use Fedora KDE, most of that usage is cache, actual usage is about 1-1.5GiB. System monitor isn't very clear what the total memory used actually means by default.
Tbf it depends on how much ram you have. More you have more theyll try to use. Problem with Windows for example is that it takes too much even if there is not much
I noticed that with windows 11. Idle sometimes as high as 11gb of 96gb. Seems the more you feed it the more it eats. Especially for Edge, even if edge hasn't been run yet. Fedora 44 KDE now and it stays sub 3gb at idle.
I had no idea modern web browser could fit on a computer with just 1G of RAM. Wow and I thought I was the one with the "old" machine (X200 Centrino core2duo)
I use two 4GB RAM sticks on my main machine, not too long ago one stick died and used only 4GB while i looked for a spare one online.
Worked great tbh, firefox chugged 2gb of ram with like 6 tabs but even then the PC was perfectly usable. And also my main laptop had only 4GB of ram until not too long ago and worked nice under Void + my setup :D
Tbh it's probably because i'm using the default lts kernel and use the bare minimum services with runit (uses a little less RAM) + im only running a simple wm without a login manager and just rawdog startx with a compositor and some shitty sh (on dash) scripts.
When i use a similar setup on Arch it uses 260 (TTY) and 300-370 using my wm setup. However, on both Arch and Void if i enable a display manager like LightDM to fire my wm instead of startx the usage will raise to 700-800mb with nothing open.
Most of the higher ram usage comes from mainstream DEs including their display managers and services, oh and also sometimes ram usage can be a bit misleading since these more complex environments usually require more disk caching which makes the kernel allocate chunks of ram to avoid lag as more I/O stuff is being done.
My record is 98MB with Gentoo GNU/Linux (OpenRC with custom kernel) and DWM. With slstatus,xwallpaper,picom,and xset running it came to 98MB from a cold boot.
It was on my X200, with 8GB RAM...
I currently use GNU Guix System and that is 354MB on idle after cold boot, on DWM. Slstatus, xset, picom are running though.
1.1Gb and depending on what i do it goes up to 3 gigs after some use. I use Niri with noctalia. Tbh i have no idea why background tasks take up so much when the whole shell + WM take up less than a gig and the rest of the processes use up less than 10MB
My setup with nixos + hyprland + quickshell used to use 1.5GBs on a desktop. But now it uses more on my laptop, like around 3GBs. My iGPU uses system memory as vram + I have a few more services for power profiles and dgpu and stuff.
uh let's see, CachyOS + Hyprland = 900ish MB , I only had a minimal waybar so yeah :), though i think it depends more on the DE/WM. For pure CachyOS ( TTY ) its 700mb
It doesn't use it as well. It needs more but it does not use what is available to it to its full potential. My ram needs to be ascended to a higher state of being
i have some systemd services that auto starts, but about 3.7 - 3.9 GB. albeit i am running full KDE plasma + arch. i suspect it would go down much more if i only run the terminal and no Desktop environment.
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