4 ms·

MacBooks don't need as much ram - I have an m1 air with 8gb of ram and it's perfectly serviceable, I can even run IntelliJ on it...

mixmastamyk 5mo ago
Compared to what? Not really true, and hard on the swap drive. Penny-wise meet pound.
- slopinthebag 5mo ago
  Well it's still kicking just fine years later, shrug
cromka 5mo ago
I never run out of memory on macoOS on my M1 Air 16GB. Now that I use Asahi on it, I had plenty of OoM crashes. macOS is really good at memory management, including the compression and offloading to the fast SSD.
- mixmastamyk 5mo ago
  You have a buggy program. Zswap has been available for quite a while.
  - baq 5mo ago
    I'm yet to see a linux distro with memory configured correctly out of the box. (I haven't looked too hard, but the defaults are abysmal.)
    - cromka 5mo ago
      Still can't help the fact memory management on macOS is vastly better with its use of pages compression and unlimited swap.
    - mixmastamyk 5mo ago
      Interesting. I'm now working on some admin scripts and will add this to the list.
  - cromka 5mo ago
    >You have a buggy program. As in memory leak? No. > Zswap has been available for quite a while. Zsawp is not Zram, which is a distant relative of the macOS on-the-fly compression I was talking about. Zram is buggy and still advised against regular use (https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/1i3mdrw/comment/m7plkkx https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/1i3mdrw/comment..., https://chrisdown.name/2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-what.html https://chrisdown.name/2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-...). Zsawp itself is enabled by default in Asahi. Zram and Zsawp are mutually exclusive on Linux. On macOS, both concepts coexist – except macOS is able to compress individual memory pages (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38300432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38300432) on the fly. Zram is a compressed RAM block device with a hard capacity limit. There is really no comparison here at this point. macOS is vastly superior in that regard.
    - mixmastamyk 5mo ago
      zswap works well in my experience. Don't need both. Combined with systemd-oomd I haven't had a swapping or memory issue in many years. 16gb here with VMs and lots going on. This doc clears some things up: https://chrisdown.name/2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-what.html https://chrisdown.name/2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-...
      - cromka 5mo ago
        > Combined with systemd-oomd That's my whole point: on Linux a process gets killed to prevent a system lock up if you're about to run out of memory or swap. That never happens on macOS, as long as you have some SSD left, period.
        mixmastamyk 5mo ago
        That’s not what I want (rogue program swapping until disk full), nor do I think most people want. Current zswap+oomd behavior is the best choice imho.
        cromka 5mo ago
- Retr0id 5mo ago
  Do you use Firefox? I have a theory that there's some kind of Firefox-aarch64-linux-specific memory leak but I haven't been able to track it down. I have a 16GB x86-64 Thinkpad and I rarely get OOM issues, whereas my 32GB M1 MBP running Asahi is always on the brink of OOM.
  - mixmastamyk 5mo ago
    But is it FF that is taking all the RAM? If you restart it, how long until it fills again?

mixmastamyk 5mo ago

Compared to what? Not really true, and hard on the swap drive. Penny-wise meet pound.

slopinthebag 5mo ago
Well it's still kicking just fine years later, shrug

cromka 5mo ago

I never run out of memory on macoOS on my M1 Air 16GB. Now that I use Asahi on it, I had plenty of OoM crashes. macOS is really good at memory management, including the compression and offloading to the fast SSD.

mixmastamyk 5mo ago
You have a buggy program. Zswap has been available for quite a while.
- baq 5mo ago
  I'm yet to see a linux distro with memory configured correctly out of the box. (I haven't looked too hard, but the defaults are abysmal.)
  - cromka 5mo ago
    Still can't help the fact memory management on macOS is vastly better with its use of pages compression and unlimited swap.
  - mixmastamyk 5mo ago
    Interesting. I'm now working on some admin scripts and will add this to the list.
- cromka 5mo ago
  >You have a buggy program. As in memory leak? No. > Zswap has been available for quite a while. Zsawp is not Zram, which is a distant relative of the macOS on-the-fly compression I was talking about. Zram is buggy and still advised against regular use (https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/1i3mdrw/comment/m7plkkx https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/1i3mdrw/comment..., https://chrisdown.name/2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-what.html https://chrisdown.name/2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-...). Zsawp itself is enabled by default in Asahi. Zram and Zsawp are mutually exclusive on Linux. On macOS, both concepts coexist – except macOS is able to compress individual memory pages (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38300432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38300432) on the fly. Zram is a compressed RAM block device with a hard capacity limit. There is really no comparison here at this point. macOS is vastly superior in that regard.
  - mixmastamyk 5mo ago
    zswap works well in my experience. Don't need both. Combined with systemd-oomd I haven't had a swapping or memory issue in many years. 16gb here with VMs and lots going on. This doc clears some things up: https://chrisdown.name/2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-what.html https://chrisdown.name/2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-...
    - cromka 5mo ago
      > Combined with systemd-oomd That's my whole point: on Linux a process gets killed to prevent a system lock up if you're about to run out of memory or swap. That never happens on macOS, as long as you have some SSD left, period.
      - mixmastamyk 5mo ago
        That’s not what I want (rogue program swapping until disk full), nor do I think most people want. Current zswap+oomd behavior is the best choice imho.
        cromka 5mo ago
Retr0id 5mo ago
Do you use Firefox? I have a theory that there's some kind of Firefox-aarch64-linux-specific memory leak but I haven't been able to track it down. I have a 16GB x86-64 Thinkpad and I rarely get OOM issues, whereas my 32GB M1 MBP running Asahi is always on the brink of OOM.
- mixmastamyk 5mo ago
  But is it FF that is taking all the RAM? If you restart it, how long until it fills again?