Possibly related:

screen shot of memory usage by app, showing Firefox using over 18GB of RAM

I also don’t understand why every chat app needs 1GB of RAM to itself.

  • Dave@lemmy.nzOP
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    18 hours ago

    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.

    • Demdaru@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      You just discouraged me from linux lol. Steam using 2GB RAM in the background? Am I understanding this correctly?Because on Win 10 it uses ~350 MB, even with open window.

      • Dave@lemmy.nzOP
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        5 hours ago

        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 🙂