3 ms·

I imagine the choice of desktop environment has most to do with RAM requirements in Linux. Unrelated to this, despite Ubuntu’s popularity, I think it’s one of

by dangus 7mo ago

I imagine the choice of desktop environment has most to do with RAM requirements in Linux. Unrelated to this, despite Ubuntu’s popularity, I think it’s one of the worst distro choices out there, especially for including old kernels for essentially no discernible reason. I wouldn’t go so far as defending Microslop but I do get tired of the Apple fanboys accusing Windows of being bloated and running poorly. They seem to defend Apple’s 8GB machines by saying that Apple systems perform better than Windows with the same amount of RAM. This claim is entirely unsubstantiated. Windows has a lot of problems but performance and memory efficiency is not one of them. We should recall that Microsoft actually reduced RAM usage and minimum requirements between windows 7 and 8 as they wanted to get into the tablet game, and Windows has remained efficient with memory since then as Microsoft wants Windows to come with cheap Chromebook-like hardware and other similar low-end systems.

akdev1l 7mo ago
MacOS handles memory pressure better than Linux imo (at least for interactive use cases) I have seen MacOS overcommit up to 50% of memory and still have the system be responsive. Yesterday I filled up my ram accidentally on Fedora and even earlyoom took several minutes to trigger and in the meantime the system was essentially non-responsive
- mcswell 7mo ago
  The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
  - dingaling 7mo ago
    It's exactly what it is How do you think data is created? It's lots of anecdotes, normalised.
- worthless-trash 7mo ago
  This is with earlyoom/systemd-oomd enabled ?
  - kergonath 7mo ago
    From my experience it does not help much, and I still get occasional freezes when a program misbehaves on Linux. It’s not a huge problem, but it is a problem and it exists; I have been dealing with it for about 15 years with no significant improvement.
    - worthless-trash 7mo ago
      The earlyoom/oomd changes are quite recent.. I've had a 'better' experience, but I guess it's not really fixed yet.
  - akdev1l 7mo ago
    Yeah, Fedora ships systemd-oomd It did eventually work to but it took a while. It also did not killed the culprit runaway processes somehow but it did kill enough stuff for me to regain control of the system.
- DullJZ 7mo ago
  macOS uses solid-state drives to do swap to help increase virtual memory. I can run multiple browsers and IDEs smoothly on my 8GB MacBook.
anthk 7mo ago
Both Ubuntu and Trisquel have backports for mainline and LTS kernels. Also, GNU/Linux has ZRAM, 4GB can work as 6.
dryarzeg 7mo ago
I am not an Apple fan, so I'll just tell my story. And yeah, it may be biased, and I may not understand something important. So around ~3 years ago or so I bought a lightweight low-end laptop (Intel Core i3, 14 inch display, 8GB of RAM) for everyday stuff so I could easily bring it with me everywhere I need to go (I mean, everywhere I would need it). It came with Windows 11 pre-installed. Now, for you to understand, previously, like ~10 years ago or so I had a Windows 7 system and it was pretty neat. And I remembered when people were switching from Windows 7 to Windows 8 or 10, they blamed the new OS version just like right now the Windows 11 was blamed; yet everyone got used to it, it received some fixes, improvements, etc; so I thought "well, maybe Windows 11 is not so bad, I should try it out at least just for the sake of curiosity". And now, the clean installation of the Windows 11 that came to my was requiring like ~20 seconds to fully boot up to the login window. I know that my laptop is not best of the best, but still... After a startup, with no apps opened, there was like ~4 GB of RAM usage just out of nowhere; so effectively I was limited to ~4GB of RAM to run something I want to. Bluetooth drivers were terrible (at the time) - sometimes I was able to connect to my headphones and sometimes I wasn't, while they were working with all of my other devices perfectly. Then there was also this hellish "Antimalware Executable" - and I know how it sounds, I have nothing against anti-virus software, but when it randomly shows up several times per day, eats all of your processing power (like ~80% of CPU usage, and note that I have 8 cores ~3 GHz here), heats up your laptop to the point that fan starts screaming... that was not very good, to speak softly. Battery usage was also a disappointment - sometimes it couldn't last for just 3 hours, while the most heavy thing I was doing during that time was compilation of some software. I was trying, I was re-configuring, I was applying patches... and finally I got fed up with all of this bloat, broken updates and other garbage. So I just backed up all of my important files and data to external drive and installed Linux Mint (because in this particular case I just needed working laptop). And wow, it just worked! Now at startup I get like ~1 GB RAM usage at most (this actually depends on the DE I use, so numbers could be different from time to time), battery life improved, no more weird Bluetooth issues, no more random bloatware... it just works, and that's it. I know that distros like Mint are focused on stability and efficiency, so maybe the comparison is a bit unfair. But hell, even while I don't have anything against Windows 7 or Windows 8, the recent Windows 11 is a real combination of bloatware and spyware. So performance and memory efficiency is, actually, the problem here. Or at least it was a problem last time I tried it. Now, again, I may be wrong somewhere, maybe I missed something out. If I did - please point it out.
morphid-rabbit 7mo ago
Best kernel recommendations? Mainly for extremely long running (2+ years) SaaS applications. Stability overall. Is running a handful of docker containers and some binaries.
- embedding-shape 7mo ago
  Linux LTS if stability is the most important. Realistically, "normal" Linux works for for it too, not sure you have to care as deeply about what kernel you use as you seem to do. On my desktop I use linux-cachyos-bore-lto which seems to give me a slight performance boost in compilation times compared to the regular kernel, but I've had at least one crash that I've unable to attribute to any other specific issue, so could be the kernel I suppose, I wouldn't use it on a server nonetheless.
- dangus 7mo ago
  For desktop use, I find that being on the latest stable kernels is best because you get things like recent AMD graphics drivers and support for recent hardware and laptops. I’m in an arch-based distro and my kernel updates all the time. I’ve never had an issue. The stability benefits of LTS seem completely useless in comparison. Just my opinion though. If you’re running applications as in a server that’s an entirely different discussion. I have been assuming we are talking about desktop users who are not serving anything. E.g., if I go out and buy a 2026 Panther Lake laptop with a new WiFi 7 chip or what have you, I’m going to want a distro with the latest kernels so that I don’t have hardware issues. If I install the default Ubuntu download it’s going to almost certainly have problems.
- elcritch 7mo ago
  FreeBSD is touted for long running and stability.
Alifatisk 7mo ago
> I wouldn’t go so far as defending Microslop > I do get tired of the Apple fanboys accusing Windows of being bloated and running poorly. > Windows has a lot of problems but performance and memory efficiency is not one of them. I can't even describe how much your experience differs from mine. I would never have imagine someone to utter such sentence about Windows in todays day and age. For everyone else reading this, a couple of advice I have gotten that made me suffer less with Windows is to replace Windows search with Everything (by Voidtools) and replace Explorer with Filepilot (filepilot.tech). On a older machine, I switched to Tiny10.
- dangus 7mo ago
  I also use Everything. But I'm not sure how Windows Search not being the best has much to do with the system's overall RAM usage. Explorer works fine for me but File Pilot does look cool. I'll give it a try. (Good luck replacing Finder on Mac, is that even possible?) I only use Windows for desktop and if I was clean installing I'd probably switch it to Linux. My laptop is Linux then I share a macOS system with my partner which I occasionally use for things that require Mac. I wouldn't say I suffer at all with Windows. It's fine. It runs, it performs well, it's stable. I can't speak to other people who have different experiences. I usually assume they're using some kind of OEM abomination while I used the plain ISO downloaded from Microsoft, and I've already gone through the ~10 minutes of effort to turn off the annoying stuff. I sold my personal Mac and switched to Linux on Framework 13" after Liquid Glass came out. It was almost as jarring and poorly executed as Windows 8. Well, okay, maybe that's going too far. (The other problem with my MacBook was the tiny amount of storage was growing difficult to work with, much easier to toss a 2TB SSD into a Framework and finally be done with worrying about storage)

by dangus 7mo ago

akdev1l 7mo ago

MacOS handles memory pressure better than Linux imo (at least for interactive use cases) I have seen MacOS overcommit up to 50% of memory and still have the system be responsive. Yesterday I filled up my ram accidentally on Fedora and even earlyoom took several minutes to trigger and in the meantime the system was essentially non-responsive

mcswell 7mo ago
The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
- dingaling 7mo ago
  It's exactly what it is How do you think data is created? It's lots of anecdotes, normalised.
worthless-trash 7mo ago
This is with earlyoom/systemd-oomd enabled ?
- kergonath 7mo ago
  From my experience it does not help much, and I still get occasional freezes when a program misbehaves on Linux. It’s not a huge problem, but it is a problem and it exists; I have been dealing with it for about 15 years with no significant improvement.
  - worthless-trash 7mo ago
    The earlyoom/oomd changes are quite recent.. I've had a 'better' experience, but I guess it's not really fixed yet.
- akdev1l 7mo ago
  Yeah, Fedora ships systemd-oomd It did eventually work to but it took a while. It also did not killed the culprit runaway processes somehow but it did kill enough stuff for me to regain control of the system.
DullJZ 7mo ago
macOS uses solid-state drives to do swap to help increase virtual memory. I can run multiple browsers and IDEs smoothly on my 8GB MacBook.

anthk 7mo ago

Both Ubuntu and Trisquel have backports for mainline and LTS kernels. Also, GNU/Linux has ZRAM, 4GB can work as 6.

dryarzeg 7mo ago

I am not an Apple fan, so I'll just tell my story. And yeah, it may be biased, and I may not understand something important. So around ~3 years ago or so I bought a lightweight low-end laptop (Intel Core i3, 14 inch display, 8GB of RAM) for everyday stuff so I could easily bring it with me everywhere I need to go (I mean, everywhere I would need it). It came with Windows 11 pre-installed. Now, for you to understand, previously, like ~10 years ago or so I had a Windows 7 system and it was pretty neat. And I remembered when people were switching from Windows 7 to Windows 8 or 10, they blamed the new OS version just like right now the Windows 11 was blamed; yet everyone got used to it, it received some fixes, improvements, etc; so I thought "well, maybe Windows 11 is not so bad, I should try it out at least just for the sake of curiosity". And now, the clean installation of the Windows 11 that came to my was requiring like ~20 seconds to fully boot up to the login window. I know that my laptop is not best of the best, but still... After a startup, with no apps opened, there was like ~4 GB of RAM usage just out of nowhere; so effectively I was limited to ~4GB of RAM to run something I want to. Bluetooth drivers were terrible (at the time) - sometimes I was able to connect to my headphones and sometimes I wasn't, while they were working with all of my other devices perfectly. Then there was also this hellish "Antimalware Executable" - and I know how it sounds, I have nothing against anti-virus software, but when it randomly shows up several times per day, eats all of your processing power (like ~80% of CPU usage, and note that I have 8 cores ~3 GHz here), heats up your laptop to the point that fan starts screaming... that was not very good, to speak softly. Battery usage was also a disappointment - sometimes it couldn't last for just 3 hours, while the most heavy thing I was doing during that time was compilation of some software. I was trying, I was re-configuring, I was applying patches... and finally I got fed up with all of this bloat, broken updates and other garbage. So I just backed up all of my important files and data to external drive and installed Linux Mint (because in this particular case I just needed working laptop). And wow, it just worked! Now at startup I get like ~1 GB RAM usage at most (this actually depends on the DE I use, so numbers could be different from time to time), battery life improved, no more weird Bluetooth issues, no more random bloatware... it just works, and that's it. I know that distros like Mint are focused on stability and efficiency, so maybe the comparison is a bit unfair. But hell, even while I don't have anything against Windows 7 or Windows 8, the recent Windows 11 is a real combination of bloatware and spyware. So performance and memory efficiency is, actually, the problem here. Or at least it was a problem last time I tried it. Now, again, I may be wrong somewhere, maybe I missed something out. If I did - please point it out.

morphid-rabbit 7mo ago

Best kernel recommendations? Mainly for extremely long running (2+ years) SaaS applications. Stability overall. Is running a handful of docker containers and some binaries.

embedding-shape 7mo ago
Linux LTS if stability is the most important. Realistically, "normal" Linux works for for it too, not sure you have to care as deeply about what kernel you use as you seem to do. On my desktop I use linux-cachyos-bore-lto which seems to give me a slight performance boost in compilation times compared to the regular kernel, but I've had at least one crash that I've unable to attribute to any other specific issue, so could be the kernel I suppose, I wouldn't use it on a server nonetheless.
dangus 7mo ago
For desktop use, I find that being on the latest stable kernels is best because you get things like recent AMD graphics drivers and support for recent hardware and laptops. I’m in an arch-based distro and my kernel updates all the time. I’ve never had an issue. The stability benefits of LTS seem completely useless in comparison. Just my opinion though. If you’re running applications as in a server that’s an entirely different discussion. I have been assuming we are talking about desktop users who are not serving anything. E.g., if I go out and buy a 2026 Panther Lake laptop with a new WiFi 7 chip or what have you, I’m going to want a distro with the latest kernels so that I don’t have hardware issues. If I install the default Ubuntu download it’s going to almost certainly have problems.
elcritch 7mo ago
FreeBSD is touted for long running and stability.

Alifatisk 7mo ago

> I wouldn’t go so far as defending Microslop > I do get tired of the Apple fanboys accusing Windows of being bloated and running poorly. > Windows has a lot of problems but performance and memory efficiency is not one of them. I can't even describe how much your experience differs from mine. I would never have imagine someone to utter such sentence about Windows in todays day and age. For everyone else reading this, a couple of advice I have gotten that made me suffer less with Windows is to replace Windows search with Everything (by Voidtools) and replace Explorer with Filepilot (filepilot.tech). On a older machine, I switched to Tiny10.

dangus 7mo ago
I also use Everything. But I'm not sure how Windows Search not being the best has much to do with the system's overall RAM usage. Explorer works fine for me but File Pilot does look cool. I'll give it a try. (Good luck replacing Finder on Mac, is that even possible?) I only use Windows for desktop and if I was clean installing I'd probably switch it to Linux. My laptop is Linux then I share a macOS system with my partner which I occasionally use for things that require Mac. I wouldn't say I suffer at all with Windows. It's fine. It runs, it performs well, it's stable. I can't speak to other people who have different experiences. I usually assume they're using some kind of OEM abomination while I used the plain ISO downloaded from Microsoft, and I've already gone through the ~10 minutes of effort to turn off the annoying stuff. I sold my personal Mac and switched to Linux on Framework 13" after Liquid Glass came out. It was almost as jarring and poorly executed as Windows 8. Well, okay, maybe that's going too far. (The other problem with my MacBook was the tiny amount of storage was growing difficult to work with, much easier to toss a 2TB SSD into a Framework and finally be done with worrying about storage)