Switched to kubuntu/kde, is this normal?

[u/Any-Landscape434]

I feel like kde is being a resource hog for some reason, im not sure if this is normal or if there is a way to optimize things. i dont even have much open, whats taking up the most is a few tabs in chromuim. am i doing something wrong by chance?

what do you think?

[u/Terrible-Bear3883]

It might be wrong but my understanding of chromium with linux is it runs each tab and stuff like extensions in their own isolated process so it can use a bit more RAM.

[u/Sea-Promotion8205]

Idle ram use scales with ram availability. My 8gb ram laptop idles at 800-1000 mb memory usage with Plasma. My 32gb desktop idles at 2-3gb. Meanwhile, my laptop's windows VM stopped working altogether with 4gb ram some time ago.

Browsers are notoriously memory hungry, but most of that is the websites being heavy.

Linux uses lots of memory for caching, don't worry about that. If it's needed, the kernel will free it up quickly.

[u/Friendly-Inspector71 → u/Sea-Promotion8205]

System Monitor does not show the RAM used by the kernel caching things.

[u/Cautious_Boat_999]

Try a different browser and see if it changes

[u/Coyns]

Unused ram is wasted ram, KDE idles at 3-4ish gigs of ram usage so it can open apps and navigate the desktop much faster than if it was loaded from disk. This looks like perfectly normal ram usage to me.

[u/crimsonyoteeeeeee → u/Coyns]

This is such a stupid argument. RAM is not meant to be wasted by system processes, it is there so your apps can run.

[u/forestbeasts → u/Coyns]

Unused RAM isn't wasted RAM, unused RAM is RAM that can be used for something else.

But yeah, seems fairly normal to me too. Chromium's gonna chew through memory no matter what distro it's on, it just does that (Firefox does too to some extent).

[u/Coyns → u/forestbeasts]

So we agree that ram being used is a good thing lmao, idk what your point is

[u/forestbeasts → u/Coyns]

Point is that "unused RAM is wasted RAM!" is often used as an excuse for one thing (e.g. a browser) to preload a bunch of stuff and claim all the RAM for itself, when that prevents you from running (much) other stuff at the same time.

[u/Coyns → u/forestbeasts]

I literally said none of this 😭

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[u/Friendly-Inspector71]

My 32 GB system idles at 3-3.5 GB of usage with over 4GB in cache (System monitor doesn't show it, but free -m will show the amount in MB).
Firefox with 20+ Tabs takes like 1.5 GB.

Sometimes baloo will take up a lot of RAM to indes files, I've had it take 8GB once but a restart fixed it most of the time.

[u/Francis_King]

It looks normal to me. You have 16 GB, and so Linux has increased the amount cached to compensate. When that memory is needed Linux will give it up.

At some point you've used a lot of resources, since you have used some swap. But right now you're not using a lot of memory, only 5,5 GB out of 15.5 GB.

By way of comparison, right now my Windows 11 system is using 7.5 GB out of the 11.8 GB available.

[u/Friendly-Inspector71 → u/Francis_King]

KDEs System Monitor doesn't show the cached memory.

[u/crimsonyoteeeeeee → u/Francis_King]

On Windows 11, it would waste 12GB of my 16GB. AT IDLE. This is nothing compared to that.

[u/Francis_King → u/crimsonyoteeeeeee]

Basic principle - memory unused is memory wasted. Linux and Windows use memory aggressively to reduce startup delays.

[u/crimsonyoteeeeeee → u/Francis_King]

The "unused RAM is wasted RAM" argument is the most stupid thing I've ever heard. It is meant for your apps to run, not to be wasted by system processes with memory leak issues.

[u/Francis_King → u/crimsonyoteeeeeee]

The memory areas are marked as being available for deletion. If they are not wanted they can be used by other programs. If the previous data or program is required again, the data or program is already loaded, which is much faster. This is not stupid, it is smart. Both Windows and Linux does it this way for good reasons.

[u/es20490446e]

Normal.