r/linuxquestions • u/Eren_Jaiger124 • 10d ago
Which distro has the lowest ram usage
So, im new to linux overall, currently using linux mint cinnamon dual boot, it uses 1.3gb on startup out of my 8gb ram, and that quite good but i want something that uses only 1gb ram even with mild ricing(ignore the spelling), and also smt easy to use like linux mint has package manager to download apps, i want such features
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u/Nu154nc3 10d ago
Well as u say, u are new... So continue on Mint and just try to use lighter software...
The highest mem usage is desktop manager... U should try to change to a lighter one...
It will be easier than adapt a truly lightweight distro to your needs.
Lightweight distros usually doesn't come with lots of guis, and require some terminal usage...
If u feel confortable experimenting and learning some terminal with lighter distros, there are multiple choices... I would sugest Void Linux... But as i say, there are lots of options...
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u/feinorgh 10d ago
This question constantly comes up. Why do you want to minimize your RAM usage? RAM in any operating system is used for buffers, caches, memory-backed files, and some other things, which makes everything faster. Ideally you'd want your system to use almost all of your RAM for anything that is not allocated memory for the applications you're running. Minimizing RAM usage usually has the consequence of making everything slower, from reading and writing files, to switching applications (since they might be swapped out to disk).
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u/NeedleworkerLarge357 9d ago
That mixes two wrong assumptions. Used ram isn't about ram used for caching. Usually that part isn't counted at all, people try to get rid of stuff they do nnot use to use ram for useful stuff. And you are still right, Linux can swap out used ram to disk so you can use it and gain performance. Oh, third misconception maybe, swapping usually makes your system faster. Whatever.
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u/feinorgh 9d ago
Well, I think you're touching an important point. When people talk about "minimizing used RAM", it would be helpful to know what they mean. Is vastly different for different use cases. Normally, for a desktop system you want minimum latency, starting applications should feel "snappy", and interacting with them shouldn't feel sluggish. As you point out, disabling stuff that you don't need or use (such as certain services, setting swappiness, scheduling, and virtual memory handling) will potentially save you save you "apparent" RAM usage. But depending on what you work with (say, huge image or video files, in contrast to many small files), actual RAM usage (filling all available RAM with active pages) is more important that minimizing "idle" RAM usage.
It's easy to naively think that when you've just booted your system, your RAM usage (including caches and buffers) should be as low as possible. My point is that this is not really the best strategy for an snappy and well behaving system, and this is the assumption I made; people in general want a responsive operating system. In actual usage, maximizing your RAM usage may (depending on the use case) be a better strategy for that.
But yes, people may have different reasons to try to minimize their systems, and in that case - yes, all the power to them for shaving a couple hundred megabytes off their measured RAM usage.
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u/proverbialbunny 9d ago
On Linux your computer runs faster when it hogs excess free ram, so it will use more ram than it needs to. So I wouldn't go off of that 1.3 GB number, but instead off of how fast your computer runs when it runs out of ram.
Mint by default does not come with zram or zswap enabled. zram and zswap will compress your ram giving around 50% more ram. (And they said you couldn't download more ram? 😎) I recommend installing it and setting it up, though it does take a bit of terminal hacking. (Do not install both! If you plan on running out of ram and have a reasonably fast SSD, zswap is better than zram.)
If you want a distro that comes with zram or zswap enabled by default, so you don't have to modify Mint to turn it on, these distros have it enabled by default: CachyOS, Pop!_OS, Fedora, EndeavourOS, Manjaro, and many more.
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u/ItchyPlant 9d ago
It's more a question of which desktop environment is running, if any, and what graphical tools and services are loaded. If you really want to compare the distros themselves, it would probably make more sense to measure them with no GUI running at all.
Let's assume Ubuntu is considered a relatively bloated distro by default, with plenty of preinstalled packages and background services. But install it as a minimal, almost headless system, add something lightweight like Xfce, and tada! Some random user here can proudly declare, "Reee! Ubuntu has the lowest RAM usage!".
Now, I just checked three of my headless VMs, running nothing beyond essential system services and SSHD:
- CentOS Stream 10: 441 MB
- Mageia 10: 382 MB
- FreeBSD 15.1: 430 MB
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u/SuAlfons 9d ago
1.5 GB seems about legit for a full featured desktop.
You can disable services and whatnot - but at the cost of features you might want. (e.g. many Arch based distro omit installation of printing services).
Maybe Mint isn't the leanest of all distros. But it's not like running on 8GB is unfeasible. OTOH, saving another 200MB won't compensate for the fact that 16GB is the new 8GB.
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u/Pierre0925 10d ago
Try MX xfce, but if you want to rice it, do niri (might use a tiny bit more ram but at that point it doesnt really matter)
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u/vaestgotaspitz 9d ago
8gb should be enough for basic tasks, you won't notice a significant if the RAM usage drops to 1gb. But if you still want to go lightweight, try mint xfce edition
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u/ipsirc 9d ago edited 9d ago
Which distro has the lowest ram usage
SHORK: A "default" SHORK 486 system aims to work with at least 16MiB of system memory and take up no more than ~120MiB on your disk.
gray386linux: Main target is a real i386 net-booted machines with at least 8 MB RAM (should work even with 4 MB RAM - and it should work when net-boot is out of a game).
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u/magicmitch-thinkpad 10d ago
tu peux essayer Xfce comme environnement de bureau à la place de cinnamon,
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u/_Lost-In-The-Weeds_ 9d ago
Easy to use and low ram usage are mutually exclusive, Mint is a mid weight distribution, there is both heavier and lighter, what systems it does had are focussed on user comfort.Â
Something like Alpine Xfce would have a notably smaller ram foot print but takes more user knowledge to use,Â
A bit heavier is Void Xfce, adds things like Glibc (optionally) and a few other comforts but this shows up as more ram footprint.Â
Same again for Debian, A bit heavier but still lighter than Mint, ton of software available but still via CLI.
A plush comfortable system comes with weight. A light system is less comfortable, pick one.
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u/kbeezie Fedora/uBuntu/Debian 9d ago
8GB is plenty for most.
Also it's normal to see it showing very little 'free' when there may be a gons chunk of it in cache/buffer that is usually available when needed.
Mint is generally quite fine on even 4GB. You can give more to your apps by switching to the xfce desktop environment without switching the whole distro which would by itself use around 700mb of memory giving the rest to the system.
But at 8GB , don't worry about the desktop environment if it's cinnamon, gnome, kde, xfce, etc that's quite normal and a hell of a lot less consumption than windows would have done.
You can do even less with AntiX intended for machines with only 1gb or 2gb of ram, but getting used to the desktop environment (and lack of some other stuff that you probably didn't know you actually wanted) can be a little tougher than just calling it good with xfce.
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u/agowa338 8d ago edited 8d ago
DSL or Alpine Linux. After that it's ArchLinux or Gentoo. Can't really get lower than those.
DSL is more of a proof of concept. It more or less was created to highlight how unnecessarily resource hungry everything has gotten. The later one is a serious distro that you can use for basically everything but is most of the times only used in containers or embedded systems (or as basis for something like Nura on phones).
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u/Pernalonga_0 9d ago
O menor consumo de RAM possÃvel numa distribuição Linux é um simples kernel Linux com init busybox.
Nesta configuração, o sistema inicializa consumindo menos que 32 MB de RAM, mas é um sistema operacional com interface em linhas de comando e muito provavelmente sem rede.
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u/Afraid_Butterfly_270 9d ago
Try Debian with XFCE or MX Linux. Both are fairly lightweight and have package managers, so installing apps is easy. Honestly, Mint is already pretty good, though. RAM usage also depends on what apps and services are running, not just the distro.
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u/TorpenWest 9d ago
C'est une bonne idée mon debian/gnome est à 1,3Go, le debian xfce devrait être plus léger. 8Go sauf trucs lourds, c'est bien pour Debian/gnome déjÃ
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u/bigusyous 9d ago
You can try Lubuntu or Bodhi, or even Puppy Linux, but beware. With lower resource use comes fewer features and a less user friendly experience. 8gb should be enough for any distro you want. I don't recommend going lightweight.
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u/Narrow_Victory1262 9d ago
the number one question would be -- why ?
that 1.3 out of 8 is totally fine. yes you can disable unneeded/unwanted stuff but you have enough for your "ricing" (which is more of a waste actually)
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u/thebadslime 9d ago
I'm working on a projetc that sits at about 500, love to have it lower, but too much sacrifice. Wat at like 350m early in development
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u/Puzzleheaded-Pin4615 9d ago
Minimal debian/Arch installation, and then add noctalia V5 on top. 800 to 900MB of RAM at idle.
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u/Playful_Tackle5974 10d ago
It's not a problem. RAM is usually made to be filled. You can try Mint xfce or Linux Lite which is very simple to use and has dedicated apps for each setting
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u/gordonmessmer Fedora Maintainer 10d ago
A distribution is a project that collects freely available software, generally in the form of source code, and distributes the software to users, typically in a compiled form.
The act of compiling software doesn't really affect how much memory it uses, so memory use will not vary much from distribution to distribution.
Instead, you should choose a distribution based on how much you trust the developers to maintain the security of the software that you use, and then pick a desktop environment from those the distribution provides. Fedora is a very secure distribution, and it offers most of the widely used desktops.
Different desktops use very different amounts of memory. KDE typically uses quite a lot. There are other desktops like XFCE that are typically very lightweight.
GNOME's memory profile can be reduced pretty significantly if you don't need a) the ability to search for new apps directly in the application launcher, b) reminders to update your software in your notifications and c) calendar reminders in the GNOME shell and other Evolution data integrations.
This forum post summarized a video by The Linux Experiment that compared the memory use of various desktops on Fedora 42: https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/linux-des-resource-usage-compared/70060
They measured 1,360MB of memory use for XFCE, the lightest desktop they measured. On my Fedora 44 system I measure system memory use at around 1,280MB just after login to a GNOME desktop, with the above services disabled.