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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • I traced this back to a particular rogue website. But yeah I think GNOME uses more RAM anyway, then having everything containerised in Bazzite is extra RAM I’m sure. Then having like 5 chat apps, Steam Firefox, etc open was easily eating up my 16GB RAM. Of course more RAM means more is used because unused RAM is wasted RAM, so it’s hard to judge one system against another.




  • I know my wife had some computer in her family earlier than we did in mine, it had a black and green screen (as in the screen only showed those colours). Not sure what it was, but it must have been the 80s I’d guess.

    Looking through the wikipedia page for the Apply II I’m pretty sure one of the variations is what we had at school that I was referring to. I find it really hard to remember back that far, though!

    I used Windows through to when I got a Mac for a while and used OSX (it was during the intel CPU period and I dual booted Windows). I had tested out various Linux distros over the years and always had a live linux CD just in case I needed to rescue a computer, but didn’t use it as a daily driver until I got my current laptop about 3 years ago. I switched from Windows to Linux cold turkey, no dual boot. I figured most things are in the browser these days anyway. The only thing I’ve never solved is that my scanner will scan at 1200DPI in Windows but never more than 300DPI in Linux. I have drivers downloaded from the Brother website but it doesn’t help 🙁. So I have to use my wife’s Windows laptop if I want to scan photos.


  • It’s hovering more like 1.7GB right now, with 1GB shared RAM (I don’t really get what that is in regards to the 1.7GB in use).

    I’m also running Bazzite, a gamer-focused linux distro, but it is special. It’s an atomic distro, meaning instead of the traditional way of updates where the update program installs each of hundreds of components, in an atomic distro you get the whole update as a block. All files except the user space are read only, and so almost any application you install will instead be a containerised flatpak because otherwise it might get overwritten by an update (you can still install things the old way, sort of, but it’s heavily discouraged and a last resort.

    Steam also has a *.deb for Debian based distros (e.g. Ubuntu or Mint in addition to actual Debian). A native application probably uses less RAM than a containerised version, I’m guessing.

    Don’t let my weird system put you off. Linux is a fun adventure! For me, jumping around different distributions from time to time is part of the fun 🙂





  • The RAM use kept growing until it locked up and I got booted back to the login screen, losing everything unsaved. Now it’s back to normal but when I run free -m the numbers match what’s in the GUI.

    I’m pretty sure the culprit was a website for uploading photos for printing. Something odd about it, I did upload 1,000 photos at about 2GB total, but it was sucking up RAM Like crazy. Firefox was using some fifty-something GB of RAM.


  • So if we say Firefox is using 4GB which seems pretty normal, then add on normal background apps Element, Beeper, Signal, Caprine, each using 1GB with no window open for some reason. Steam uses 2GB just to run in the background. The only window open is Firefox and I’m already at 10GB without counting what the system needs.

    I normally also have Joplin open, there’s another 1GB. And Nextcloud in the background + Betterbird for email, together another 1GB.

    Now if I want to actually do something, I might open a JetBrains IDE like PHPStorm which if I open 2 windows with 2 different projects could easily take 4GB.




  • I don’t remember those days. I used Windows 3.1 (with DOS for games) at a relatives house, but it was too early for me to understand about the hardware. We also had some Apple computers at school with I think 5 1/4" floppy disks but again I didn’t really get technically savvy until I was older.

    The first PC we had at home was Windows 95. I seem to recall we had a pretty decent amount of RAM. Maybe 32MB or perhaps even 64MB.


  • Yeah the cache as part of used memory theory didn’t stack up. This comment (sorry, Lemmy probably doesn’t handle the link well) showed 54GB in use, 30GB cached, and 13GB available. 54+12 = 67GB total so cached doesn’t seem to be counted as in use since it should be counted as free (mostly).

    In the end, I’m pretty sure it’s a memory hog website. It kept filling up until GNOME crashed and I lost my progress (I was trying to order prints for 1000 photos on a horrible website that made me change settings one photo at a time, and the longer I took the more RAM filled up).

    Anyway the fact that you can’t run Linux with 16GB is weird

    I mean, it runs fine. It’s more how I’m using it. Firefox 4GB, Element 1GB, Signal 1GB, Beeper 1GB, Steam 2GB, Joplin 1GB. That’s all just open and idle (chats and Steam don’t even have windows, just background) and are the minimum I would have open at any point. That’s already 10GB. By the time I open a couple of windows in a Jetbrains IDE or a particularly demanding website and suddenly it’s suffocating.