4 ms·

I know 2GB isn't very heavy in OS terms these days, but it's still enough to hold nearly 350 uncompressed 1080p 24-bit images. There's rather a lot of informat

by Lerc 7mo ago

I know 2GB isn't very heavy in OS terms these days, but it's still enough to hold nearly 350 uncompressed 1080p 24-bit images. There's rather a lot of information in a single uncompressed 1080p image. I can't help but wonder what it all gets used to for.

adgjlsfhk1 7mo ago
well to start, you likely have 2 screen size buffers for current and next frame. The primary code portion is drivers since the modern expectation is that you can plug in pretty much anything and have it work automatically.
- Lerc 7mo ago
  How often do you plug in a new device without a flurry of disk activity occurring?
senfiaj 7mo ago
I also believe that this memory usage might be decreased significantly, but I don't know how much (and how much is worth it). Some RAM usage might be useful, such as caching or for things related with graphics. Some is a cumulative bloat in applications caused by not caring much or duplication of used libraries. But I remember in 2016 Fedora Gnome consumed about 1.6GB of RAM on my PC with 2GB of RAM a decade ago. Considering that after a decade the standard Ubuntu Gnome consumes only 400MB more RAM and also that my new laptop has 16GB of RAM (the system might use more RAM when more RAM is installed), I think the increase is not that bad for a decade. I thought it would be much worse.
- KronisLV 7mo ago
  I remember running Xubuntu (XFCE) and Lubuntu (LXDE, before LXQt) on a laptop with 4 GB of RAM and it was a pretty pleasant experience! My guess is that the desktop environment is the culprit for most modern distros!
  - abenga 7mo ago
    Gnome 50 and its auxilliary services on my machine uses maybe 400MB. The culprit is browsers, mostly.
- jonhohle 7mo ago
  Buy why that much? The first computer I bought had 192MB of RAM and I ran a 1600x1200 desktop with 24-bit color. When Windows 2000 came out, all of the transparency effects ran great. Office worked fine, Visual Studio, 1024x768 gaming (I know that’s quite a step down from 1080p). What has changed? Why do I need 10x the RAM to open a handful of terminals and a text editor?
  - winrid 7mo ago
    Higher res icons probably add a couple hundred megs alone
    - Lerc 7mo ago
      Well if you have a 512x512 icon uncompressed it is an even megabyte, so that makes the calculations fairly easy. But raw imagery is one of the few cases where you can legitimately require large amounts of RAM because of the squaring nature of area. You only need that raw state in a limited number of situations where you are manipulating the data though. If you are dealing with images without descending to pixels then there's pretty much no reason to keep it all floating around in that form, You generally don't have more than a hundred icons onscreen, and once you start fetching data from the slowest RAM in your machine you get pretty decent speed gains from using decompression than trying to move the uncompressed form around.
      - winrid 7mo ago
        Aren't they usually all preloaded to prevent pop-in (or using some sort of heuristic)? anyways, I bet there's like a million little buffers all over the place in the graphics stack. It would be neat to go through all that and just see how slim you could get it, even if it broke a bunch of stuff.
  - senfiaj 7mo ago
    Partly because we have more layers of abstraction. Just an extreme example, when you open a tiny < 1KB HTML file on any modern browser the tab memory consumption will still be on the order of tens, if not hundreds of megabytes. This is because the browser has to load / initialize all its huge runtime environment (JS / DOM / CSS, graphics, etc) even though that tiny HTML file might use a tiny fraction of the browser features. Partly because increased RAM usage can sometimes improve execution speed / smoothness or security (caching, browser tab isolation). Partly because developers have less pressure to optimize software performance, so they optimize other things, such as development time. Here is an article about bloat: https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-11-04/some-software-bloat-is-ok https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-11-04/some-software-bloat-...
array_key_first 7mo ago
A lot of it is optimizing applications for higher-memory devices. RAM is completely worthless if it's not used, so ideally you should be running your software with close to maximum RAM usage for your device. Of course, the software developer doesn't necessarily know what device you will be using, or how much other software will be running, so they aim for averages. For example, Java applications will claim much more memory than they need for the heap. Most of that memory will be unused, but it's necessary to have a faster running application. If you've ever run a Java app at consistently 90% heap usage, you know it grinds to an absolute halt with constant collection. The same is true for caching techniques. Reading from storage is slow, so it often makes sense to put stuff in RAM even if you're not using it very often.

by Lerc 7mo ago

adgjlsfhk1 7mo ago

well to start, you likely have 2 screen size buffers for current and next frame. The primary code portion is drivers since the modern expectation is that you can plug in pretty much anything and have it work automatically.

Lerc 7mo ago
How often do you plug in a new device without a flurry of disk activity occurring?

senfiaj 7mo ago

I also believe that this memory usage might be decreased significantly, but I don't know how much (and how much is worth it). Some RAM usage might be useful, such as caching or for things related with graphics. Some is a cumulative bloat in applications caused by not caring much or duplication of used libraries. But I remember in 2016 Fedora Gnome consumed about 1.6GB of RAM on my PC with 2GB of RAM a decade ago. Considering that after a decade the standard Ubuntu Gnome consumes only 400MB more RAM and also that my new laptop has 16GB of RAM (the system might use more RAM when more RAM is installed), I think the increase is not that bad for a decade. I thought it would be much worse.

KronisLV 7mo ago
I remember running Xubuntu (XFCE) and Lubuntu (LXDE, before LXQt) on a laptop with 4 GB of RAM and it was a pretty pleasant experience! My guess is that the desktop environment is the culprit for most modern distros!
- abenga 7mo ago
  Gnome 50 and its auxilliary services on my machine uses maybe 400MB. The culprit is browsers, mostly.
jonhohle 7mo ago
Buy why that much? The first computer I bought had 192MB of RAM and I ran a 1600x1200 desktop with 24-bit color. When Windows 2000 came out, all of the transparency effects ran great. Office worked fine, Visual Studio, 1024x768 gaming (I know that’s quite a step down from 1080p). What has changed? Why do I need 10x the RAM to open a handful of terminals and a text editor?
- winrid 7mo ago
  Higher res icons probably add a couple hundred megs alone
  - Lerc 7mo ago
    Well if you have a 512x512 icon uncompressed it is an even megabyte, so that makes the calculations fairly easy. But raw imagery is one of the few cases where you can legitimately require large amounts of RAM because of the squaring nature of area. You only need that raw state in a limited number of situations where you are manipulating the data though. If you are dealing with images without descending to pixels then there's pretty much no reason to keep it all floating around in that form, You generally don't have more than a hundred icons onscreen, and once you start fetching data from the slowest RAM in your machine you get pretty decent speed gains from using decompression than trying to move the uncompressed form around.
    - winrid 7mo ago
      Aren't they usually all preloaded to prevent pop-in (or using some sort of heuristic)? anyways, I bet there's like a million little buffers all over the place in the graphics stack. It would be neat to go through all that and just see how slim you could get it, even if it broke a bunch of stuff.
- senfiaj 7mo ago
  Partly because we have more layers of abstraction. Just an extreme example, when you open a tiny < 1KB HTML file on any modern browser the tab memory consumption will still be on the order of tens, if not hundreds of megabytes. This is because the browser has to load / initialize all its huge runtime environment (JS / DOM / CSS, graphics, etc) even though that tiny HTML file might use a tiny fraction of the browser features. Partly because increased RAM usage can sometimes improve execution speed / smoothness or security (caching, browser tab isolation). Partly because developers have less pressure to optimize software performance, so they optimize other things, such as development time. Here is an article about bloat: https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-11-04/some-software-bloat-is-ok https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-11-04/some-software-bloat-...

array_key_first 7mo ago

A lot of it is optimizing applications for higher-memory devices. RAM is completely worthless if it's not used, so ideally you should be running your software with close to maximum RAM usage for your device. Of course, the software developer doesn't necessarily know what device you will be using, or how much other software will be running, so they aim for averages. For example, Java applications will claim much more memory than they need for the heap. Most of that memory will be unused, but it's necessary to have a faster running application. If you've ever run a Java app at consistently 90% heap usage, you know it grinds to an absolute halt with constant collection. The same is true for caching techniques. Reading from storage is slow, so it often makes sense to put stuff in RAM even if you're not using it very often.