5 ms·

Gnomes' a massive memory hog I was looking at this and thinking maybe it would improve a cheap android phone. But now I know it's running gnome I won't even co

Gnomes' a massive memory hog I was looking at this and thinking maybe it would improve a cheap android phone. But now I know it's running gnome I won't even consider trying

gcr 3mo ago
Every desktop environment is a massive memory hog. Do you really want something minimal like xfce on a touchscreen?
- zzril 3mo ago
  SXMO is pretty minimal in that regard, but it doesn't force you to use the touchscreen. Can also navigate through menus via the volume buttons...
  - gf000 3mo ago
    Even that will be a massive energy vampire compared to android, that had top notch engineers working on it for close to 2 decades...
    - realusername 3mo ago
      Yes and no, SXMO will work without hardware acceleration, I've not tried but I doubt that Android will. Additionally, minimum requirements of Android 17 are way above what SXMO allows. With Phosh you would have a point but SXMO is lighter than a modern Android.
      - gf000 3mo ago
        Lighter for what? Displaying a clock? Add a bunch of fat, semi-desktop binaries that actually provide some kind of functionality to make it remotely comparable, and then you just have a worse, fatter system that runs hot and wastes the battery. Android is a unified system working together to make the device race to sleep as fast as possible, with as few wakeups as feasible (e.g. batch together events that would wake up the device).
        realusername 3mo ago
        Lighter as SXMO will run on a low budget 1GB of RAM armv7 handheld released in 2014 (maybe even 512MB of RAM), even without 3D acceleration and Android 17 just won't, no matter how much you tweak it
        gf000 3mo ago
        And what? I mean, I can also just run Linux on a raspberry pi and connect a screen to it. That in itself will have zero relevant features, it's a Linux with a screen that you can toy around with, not a phone.
        realusername 3mo ago
        I don't see how it's relevant if you want something that works on said device? In terms of resources I think it's roughly going like this, from lighter to heavier: SXMO < Lomiri (Ubuntu Touch) < Plasma mobile < Android < Phosh < Gnome mobile I could also add XFCE but they officially don't support mobile. Android isn't the lightest mobile environment by any conceivable means, maybe it's the most featured but certainly not the most optimized for low-end devices, the days of Android 11 are over. You need 4GB of ram, a good CPU and full hardware acceleration to run modern Android. And if the next Android bumps the requirements again, I would put it at the end of the list.
        chainingsolid 3mo ago
        In my experience (Pinephone) Plasma mobile was slower then Phosh by a very noticeable amount. And I remember a poll on Pine64 forum on mobile DE was like 50% Phosh...
- tim-projects 3mo ago
  I've been using openbox for over a decade. That's completely false. Xfce is not a memory hog. And it's not minimal either it's fully functional. Gnome is a bloated mess of a thing and I hate it. Why would anyone want their desktop to use over 1gb of ram. I have a 32gb laptop and I still loath the idea of throwing away memory on such a bloated awful thing. Running gnome on a phone. Yeah... No
  - ChocolateGod 3mo ago
    It doesn't run GNOME Shell, which is the main memory hog of GNOME. It uses some GNOME services, namely so it doesn't have to invent it's own. None of these services are memory heavy and all have a purpose (e.g. managing Bluetooth)
  - Striving7340 3mo ago
    Phosh is not based on gnome-shell and nobody cares if you want to run openbox on your phone.
  - belowavgiq 3mo ago
    [dead]
  - WD-42 3mo ago
    weird, I'm running GNOME on my laptop right now and I checked and it's using 275mb of ram. I would not call that particularly bloated.
freedomben 3mo ago
Do you have any numbers? The last numbers I remember seeing, had XFCE around 500 MB and gnome around 700 MB. I'm trying to find some current numbers, but it's a pretty tough thing. Without any different numbers, I think saying a massive memory hog is a little hyperbolic. Applications in use, especially browsers, are going to dwarf the desktop environment anyway. Having the polish is well worth it to many people, myself included. I would definitely like to see less memory requirements for the various desktop environments, but at the end of the day I don't pay for any of this
gf000 3mo ago
> maybe it would improve a cheap android phone. Not in a million worlds. Android is by far the most optimized OS (as a whole, including user space, graphics stack everything) for mobile devices. It's almost like the most widely used mobile operating system has had quite a bit of dev hours spent on it.
- belowavgiq 3mo ago
  Trust me, you wouldn't be saying this if you had actually tried modern Android on low powered devices. low-mid range phones drop frames more often in 2026 than they did in 2015 with Android 5-7's much simpler UI. edit: oops, the topic was RAM usage. in 2026. of course everyone, it's definitely the 200MB usage surplus that makes your phone feel heavy. let's add 1TB of RAM to a C2D and it will be ready to be paired with a 5090.
  - gf000 3mo ago
    Well, the market has consistently raised the low end of what constitutes "decent" hardware for a smartphone, and it really is not expensive today to have good enough hardware. Why should software not adapt to reality? As another data point, take a look at what "embedded" development means today. It is increasingly common to just simply have a device running full Linux, as it is getting cheap enough to do so.
    - belowavgiq 3mo ago
      [dead]
  - impure-aqua 3mo ago
    > of course everyone, it's definitely the 200MB usage surplus that makes your phone feel heavy. It actually is though? My Pixel 9a has a perfectly serviceable CPU but I am often frustrated by its 8GB of RAM. Switching to the Revolut app to generate a disposable card number consistently evicts my browser tab from RAM. ~100% of the time this happens and I get extremely frustrated by it losing my state in the checkout flow.

Gnomes' a massive memory hog I was looking at this and thinking maybe it would improve a cheap android phone. But now I know it's running gnome I won't even consider trying

gcr 3mo ago

Every desktop environment is a massive memory hog. Do you really want something minimal like xfce on a touchscreen?

zzril 3mo ago
SXMO is pretty minimal in that regard, but it doesn't force you to use the touchscreen. Can also navigate through menus via the volume buttons...
- gf000 3mo ago
  Even that will be a massive energy vampire compared to android, that had top notch engineers working on it for close to 2 decades...
  - realusername 3mo ago
    Yes and no, SXMO will work without hardware acceleration, I've not tried but I doubt that Android will. Additionally, minimum requirements of Android 17 are way above what SXMO allows. With Phosh you would have a point but SXMO is lighter than a modern Android.
    - gf000 3mo ago
      Lighter for what? Displaying a clock? Add a bunch of fat, semi-desktop binaries that actually provide some kind of functionality to make it remotely comparable, and then you just have a worse, fatter system that runs hot and wastes the battery. Android is a unified system working together to make the device race to sleep as fast as possible, with as few wakeups as feasible (e.g. batch together events that would wake up the device).
      - realusername 3mo ago
        Lighter as SXMO will run on a low budget 1GB of RAM armv7 handheld released in 2014 (maybe even 512MB of RAM), even without 3D acceleration and Android 17 just won't, no matter how much you tweak it
        gf000 3mo ago
        And what? I mean, I can also just run Linux on a raspberry pi and connect a screen to it. That in itself will have zero relevant features, it's a Linux with a screen that you can toy around with, not a phone.
        realusername 3mo ago
        I don't see how it's relevant if you want something that works on said device? In terms of resources I think it's roughly going like this, from lighter to heavier: SXMO < Lomiri (Ubuntu Touch) < Plasma mobile < Android < Phosh < Gnome mobile I could also add XFCE but they officially don't support mobile. Android isn't the lightest mobile environment by any conceivable means, maybe it's the most featured but certainly not the most optimized for low-end devices, the days of Android 11 are over. You need 4GB of ram, a good CPU and full hardware acceleration to run modern Android. And if the next Android bumps the requirements again, I would put it at the end of the list.
        chainingsolid 3mo ago
        In my experience (Pinephone) Plasma mobile was slower then Phosh by a very noticeable amount. And I remember a poll on Pine64 forum on mobile DE was like 50% Phosh...
tim-projects 3mo ago
I've been using openbox for over a decade. That's completely false. Xfce is not a memory hog. And it's not minimal either it's fully functional. Gnome is a bloated mess of a thing and I hate it. Why would anyone want their desktop to use over 1gb of ram. I have a 32gb laptop and I still loath the idea of throwing away memory on such a bloated awful thing. Running gnome on a phone. Yeah... No
- ChocolateGod 3mo ago
  It doesn't run GNOME Shell, which is the main memory hog of GNOME. It uses some GNOME services, namely so it doesn't have to invent it's own. None of these services are memory heavy and all have a purpose (e.g. managing Bluetooth)
- Striving7340 3mo ago
  Phosh is not based on gnome-shell and nobody cares if you want to run openbox on your phone.
- belowavgiq 3mo ago
  [dead]
- WD-42 3mo ago
  weird, I'm running GNOME on my laptop right now and I checked and it's using 275mb of ram. I would not call that particularly bloated.

freedomben 3mo ago

Do you have any numbers? The last numbers I remember seeing, had XFCE around 500 MB and gnome around 700 MB. I'm trying to find some current numbers, but it's a pretty tough thing. Without any different numbers, I think saying a massive memory hog is a little hyperbolic. Applications in use, especially browsers, are going to dwarf the desktop environment anyway. Having the polish is well worth it to many people, myself included. I would definitely like to see less memory requirements for the various desktop environments, but at the end of the day I don't pay for any of this

gf000 3mo ago

> maybe it would improve a cheap android phone. Not in a million worlds. Android is by far the most optimized OS (as a whole, including user space, graphics stack everything) for mobile devices. It's almost like the most widely used mobile operating system has had quite a bit of dev hours spent on it.

belowavgiq 3mo ago
Trust me, you wouldn't be saying this if you had actually tried modern Android on low powered devices. low-mid range phones drop frames more often in 2026 than they did in 2015 with Android 5-7's much simpler UI. edit: oops, the topic was RAM usage. in 2026. of course everyone, it's definitely the 200MB usage surplus that makes your phone feel heavy. let's add 1TB of RAM to a C2D and it will be ready to be paired with a 5090.
- gf000 3mo ago
  Well, the market has consistently raised the low end of what constitutes "decent" hardware for a smartphone, and it really is not expensive today to have good enough hardware. Why should software not adapt to reality? As another data point, take a look at what "embedded" development means today. It is increasingly common to just simply have a device running full Linux, as it is getting cheap enough to do so.
  - belowavgiq 3mo ago
    [dead]
- impure-aqua 3mo ago
  > of course everyone, it's definitely the 200MB usage surplus that makes your phone feel heavy. It actually is though? My Pixel 9a has a perfectly serviceable CPU but I am often frustrated by its 8GB of RAM. Switching to the Revolut app to generate a disposable card number consistently evicts my browser tab from RAM. ~100% of the time this happens and I get extremely frustrated by it losing my state in the checkout flow.