The OS will use free memory for disk caches which will help speed up any modern desktop. That's the 'cached' column output by `free`. My computer currently repo

The OS will use free memory for disk caches which will help speed up any modern desktop. That's the 'cached' column output by `free`. My computer currently reports 18 GB used out of 20 GB, but 15 GB of that is disk caching. The more memory your desktop environment grabs, the less memory is available for disk caching. It might not be a problem, but it certainly pays off to invest in extra memory and in decreasing memory consumption of applications.