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I also don't understand why every chat app needs 1GB of RAM to itself.
You can really download more ram if you use cloud storage as swap
this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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That sounds like a performant way to run a system!
Someone really did it
Haha I just searched up this person using Google Drive as swap π―
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/rrb7gk/you_cant_download_more_r/
Lol nice
Many people who don't know what they're talking about in this thread. No, used memory does not include cached memory. You can confirm this trivially by running free -m and adding up the numbers (used + cached + free = total). Used memory can not be reclaimed until the process holding it frees it or dies. Not all cached memory can be reclaimed either, which is why the kernel reports an estimate of available memory. That's the number that really matters, because aside from some edges cases that's the number that determines whether you're out of memory or not.
Anyway the fact that you can't run Linux with 16GB is weird and indicates that some software you are using has a RAM leak (a Firefox extension perhaps?). Firefox will use memory if it's there but it's designed to cope with low memory as well, it just unloads tabs quicker so you have to reload often. There are also extensions that make tab unloading more aggressive, maybe that would help - especially if there's memory pressure from other processes too.
Yeah the cache as part of used memory theory didn't stack up. This comment (sorry, Lemmy probably doesn't handle the link well) showed 54GB in use, 30GB cached, and 13GB available. 54+12 = 67GB total so cached doesn't seem to be counted as in use since it should be counted as free (mostly).
In the end, I'm pretty sure it's a memory hog website. It kept filling up until GNOME crashed and I lost my progress (I was trying to order prints for 1000 photos on a horrible website that made me change settings one photo at a time, and the longer I took the more RAM filled up).
Anyway the fact that you canβt run Linux with 16GB is weird
I mean, it runs fine. It's more how I'm using it. Firefox 4GB, Element 1GB, Signal 1GB, Beeper 1GB, Steam 2GB, Joplin 1GB. That's all just open and idle (chats and Steam don't even have windows, just background) and are the minimum I would have open at any point. That's already 10GB. By the time I open a couple of windows in a Jetbrains IDE or a particularly demanding website and suddenly it's suffocating.
many Linux distros are optimized to use as much available RAM as possible, free RAM is wasted RAM
Most would still run with a lot less anyway
Mine was definitely not handling 16GB...
what do you mean? not working well with 16 gb??
Correct. If I had a lot of stuff open (I like to keep stuff open for when I get back to it) then the whole system was slow and would sometimes lock up completely. I needed to close things to keep it stable.
Linux isn't going to help much when the applications are using a lot ram. Firefox is an absolute ram hog linux or windows. Linux is just going to use less of the ram for it self.
Oh the applications sure were using a lot of RAM, I can't deny that.
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I was running mint with 4gb with steam and signal on background as well as Firefox with 2 tabs open. Not perfect but definitely usable
I traced this back to a particular rogue website. But yeah I think GNOME uses more RAM anyway, then having everything containerised in Bazzite is extra RAM I'm sure. Then having like 5 chat apps, Steam Firefox, etc open was easily eating up my 16GB RAM. Of course more RAM means more is used because unused RAM is wasted RAM, so it's hard to judge one system against another.
every chat app needs over a gig of ram to itself for "developer productivity"
I got surprised like two days ago when I got a desktop notification that Linux kernel killed a process, because there was no memory available, or something like that. I didn't know it can do that, lol.
Pretty useful for not getting locked out. It can be finetuned if you want to assign priorities and that.
It is usually handled by systemd-oomd.
Don't be confused by cached ram, be confused by the oom killer activating while you have plenty of swap and for some reason it kills the shell you ran Firefox from.
If you want to go on a memory allocation adventure try disabling memory overcommit π₯²
systemd-oomd with its memory pressure model never really worked for me, even after configuring it to be fairly aggressive. My system still irreversibly locks up the second the memory and swap touches 100%. earlyoom with its more primitive model works much better and actually kills processes before the memory and swap hits the ceiling. Combine this with a 2x RAM size swap file and desktop Linux is finally as stable as Windows and macOS. It is just a shame that distros do not configure generous, dynamically growing, swap files and a good oom killer by default, and you have to discover this fundamental problem of the Linux kernel yourself on multiple different devices before realizing what you actually need to do to fix these random freezes.
If you're out of ram and using swap thats when the oom killer should be killing. Swap is not ram.
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I have a memory consumption issue with Ubuntu, because I stupidly set up the system to have 0 swap. This means under high memory pressure, the entire system could suddenly crash.
To be fair, Windows isn't a shining beacon either because whenever I attempt something very GPU intensive like running local LLMs the GPU overheats in a split second before the fans have time to spin up and the entire system shuts down.
How does that happen? Shouldn't the GPU and CPU have thermal throttling so even under intense loads it just slows down to keep temps down?
When I play games on my laptop the integrated graphics are at 100% most of the time but it doesn't cause the system to crash.
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oh i see you're also using a single tab for youtube and no other tabs
18gb is nothing, my Firefox regularly eats 70gb (30gb is the normal load I see after browser restart) 
How do you do this? I usually have about 2k open tabs and my firefox uses a fraction of that.
I don't know if this is something to brag about, it seems more like something isn't working right...
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