Comment on Maybe the RAM shortage will make software less bloated?
uncouple9831@lemmy.zip 7 hours agoOp seemed to be blaming ram bloat on the OS. That demonstrates ignorance of the true ram users on a given system.
Oom=out of memory. It doesn’t matter if Linux uses 500-1000 mb less ram than windows if your system locks up for 5 minutes the moment it encounters memory pressure. Linux oom handling is bad, even as recently as this year. I ended up switching my laptop back to windows because I couldn’t handle it.
Linux has this weird polarity: category 1 Linux fanbois are like look I can run this on anything (which is kind of a silly distinction because the thing that makes an os big or small is the services, not the kernel, but since windows doesn’t ship that many low-resource variants I think this is mostly fine). Look I have 3 mb of ram and the kernel runs, yay.
Then you have category 2 fanbois who get bitchy whenever you bring up the OOM issues and other things along those lines and say “well you have to size your system for your usage, and you have to predict that 5 years in advance and if you don’t we can’t help you”. These are, I assume, the category of folks who develop chromium and it’s ilk.
Somewhere in between is the vast, vast, vast majority of consumers who want to buy something at their price point and have it work for a few years in spite of changes to the non-OS world. The rise of chrome, the rise of electron apps, these are not things you could expect your average consumer to predict…and none of that is particularly impacted by the few mb extra that windows uses vs linux.
And for good measure let’s shit on apple for a moment: selling 8gb computers in 2025 is a fucking crime. I know they stopped, but it was still a fucking crime. I have their 16gb version because one can never have too many computers I guess, and it comes screeching to a halt any time I open too many tabs (still better than Linux).
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
It sounds like you have a lot of experience with running out of memory that I don’t have. I’m curious – how much ram do you have in the laptop you switched to windows? I don’t think I’ve experienced running out of memory recently. Been running Linux for like 3 years now and I’ve always felt every possible aspect is far snappier. Regarding ops comment about windows being the ram problem, I think they just were referring to it using a lot of ram, which it does. You’re calling it a few Mb and that’s just not accurate. I can’t say for sure what exact difference it was for me, but years ago I compared windows 10 to pop os. I think the difference was not far from a GB. And we can split hairs about what specifically occupies ram. Services, kernel, third party apps. The fact is that windows culture is different in a very bad way. You have to opt out of apps running on startup constantly, manually checking settings under an “advanced” tab often… I vastly prefer the culture of bloat being opt-in in almost every case. There are dozens of reasons I prefer Linux but the fact that it just runs faster without effort specifically to make that happen, is atop the list.
uncouple9831@lemmy.zip 4 hours ago
The laptop is 16 which ought to be enough and somehow is not. I used an old 8gb machine from the 2010s as a home server and while it has been stable for a few years now there were some big hiccups using btrfs on a few occasions where ram usage would skyrocket and the system would lock up until a restart. I assume if I left it long enough it would eventually accomplish whatever it was trying to do, but I ended up just reformatting to ext on the main drive (keeping the fancy filesystem for the external drives) and that seemed to avoid the problem.
I don’t disagree there’s a distinct cultural difference – you can see that immediately with gnome for example and the general shift towards low-multitasking/“focus”. Personally I want computers to have memory so I don’t have to. So I want the computer to leave everything running. I don’t want to open my music player, I want to hit play. I don’t want to open my email client, I want to get notified when there’s an email. Another relevant twist of the knife on the Linux side is thunderbird not having a tray icon and kde’s mail client being a hellish dumpster fire. What is the purpose of an email client that doesn’t stay running 24/7? Again, this is an area where android clearly gets things right in my view while the rest of the Linux ecosystem fails. Windows while imperfect on this front definitely leans in the android direction and is therefore to me far better. This is also why handling memory effectively is far more critical to me than memory efficiency. I don’t care if win vs linux base image is 500 mb or a gig, I care about the system staying responsive and seamless when moving between activities.
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Interesting take…
What would you need one for?
Genuinely confused here. To receive email? What’s the purpose of leaving it running all the time? The only difference in the setup I have and what you seem to want is that instead of clicking an email icon on the dock and waiting ~1second, you want to see a notification in the tray? Given that email is 90% noise no matter how many things I unsubscribe from, the last thing I want is a constant stream of notifications on yet another device.
I feel like specifically because I run Linux all my apps launch faster so yes I prefer to close them when not in use. Feels a lot cleaner for my mental model. Don’t get me wrong, I often run 6-8 apps at a time if I need to. But even then I don’t think I go much beyond 8 GB of ram used, unless I’m gaming.
uncouple9831@lemmy.zip 3 hours ago
You’re only getting a notification if the program is running 24/7. You seem to be contradicting yourself here. The purpose of a tray icon is to provide a hook into a running background service which can provide notifications, status, and pop up a display if needed, without rendering a full window at all times. Mac accomplishes the same concept with both tray icons and their dock, but it isn’t actually any different. Linux has plenty of things with tray icons which implement this concept, thunderbird does not. Your distaste for email is not really relevant so I’m going to skip past that – I still want to get emails when they arrive, and for that to happen there needs to be a service running. Thunderbird for windows meets the above requirements, thunderbird for Linux does not, it’s simple as that. I was using this as an illustration agreeing with your claims that the philosophy is different between the OSs. On Mac, everything is a service and windows are optional. On Linux and windows it’s more of a choice that each program makes, but on Linux it does lean towards fewer background tasks. Including, in this case, getting email notifications.
I can easily get to 10G in a browser alone thanks to their philosophy of burning through ram.