I notice with every system that over time it does end up taking more resources. Naturally, I don’t like that, so I try the following things:
Prevent bloat: I really hate bloat and I figure my strategy of avoiding it also helps keep resource usage lower. I keep things under 1000 packages on Arch based distros such as EndeavourOS. RN I have 936 packages, all from pacman, and a few AUR packages.
Ensure that I’m not running extraneous services: I don’t start anything on my own unless I know I will use it, such as Tor and NordVPNd. I also try to turn off applets until I need them, most notably Redshift.
Restart Frequently: This MATE desktop for instance starts at 590 MB but can go up to 1.2 GB on idle with nothing open over time. In order to avoid that, I restart whenever I know I’m not gonna be using it for a semi long period of time.
Use as little and lightweight as possible: If I haven’t used something for ~10 minutes and IK I won’t need it, I close it.
However, as stated above in restart frequently I still have a lot of RAM used. That’s why I’m asking you, the EOS community: What do you do to keep resource usage low?
Other than that, RAM usage itself is not a big issue, if it can be effectively unloaded / garbage collected and rest is used for caching shared resources.
I use KDE Plasma, so having under 1000 packages installed is not really a viable option for me
The number of packages installed is a fairly irrelevant stat. What matters is the number of services and other programs running, and how frugal they are with your system resources.
But with EndeavourOS, I really had no issues of excessive resource usage. KDE Plasma is typically very good about not having memory leaks, typically it uses about 500-600 MiB of RAM at any time. On all of my machines, it is Firefox that uses most of the resources, which is understandable.
However, about a year ago, when I was still using Kubuntu, the story was much different, there I had issues with excessive resource usage. But ever since I distro hopped to Manjaro, I had no problems. And now I’m using EndeavourOS and it’s even leaner, faster, and less bloated than Manjaro. The only way I could get an even leaner system is to stop using Plasma and switch to, say, dwm. But I really see no need for it.
Oh yes, @keybreak reminded me: always, always turn off file indexing. Not only does it use too much resources, it is also a potential security issue. Turning off baloo is the first thing I do when installing Plasma.
On a different note, ram usage should increase as your pc is kept on because the apps are cached in there. It’s useful - when I start Thunar for the first time after boot, it takes a few seconds. But after that, it opens instantly, because it’s cached.
Not always desirable though
I think you need to be careful how view resource usage. Unless you are actually running out of resources, Linux tries to use the resources available to it. This is a good thing. Trying to lower memory usage when you have available memory doesn’t really help things.
It’s hard to say when you have unfinished, but working 1897 lines bash script made for Manjaro…
Which should tell you level of my love/hate relationship with default KDE
Obviously just small portion of this script is dealing with usual stuff like debloat / optimisation, rest is mainly customization of programs, themes, Latte dock etc.
I’m not yet ready to public share it, but if you want i can PM you so you can see / try
I’ve tested it on Manjaro, pure Arch & EOS, also @linesma have tested it too - so far it does it’s job nice but i wouldn’t advise it for production system just yet)
But anyway, from the top of my head those i kill if they are present:
disable history of launchers / recent files in programs etc
kill klipper
baloo
Those are main things i do, when we’re talking about just system stuff.
Rest are a lot of settings like kill kwallet, workspace privacy, making sure their user feedback is disabled…
That i’m afraid only knowing your system / software by heart, but usually it’s fairly obvious when it’s heavy one, coz RAM usage start to grow exponentially…
Believe me, i’ve used Deepin for 1,5 years after all
When your WM process uses ~8Gb of RAM after 2-3 days of use (caused by spawning VirtualBox VM and crashing / restarting) - you know it’s memory leak
I am not using KDE (Cinnamon here) I would appreciate if you could explain more in what way indexing is a security issue. Is there something similar on Cinnamon? There is an updatedb.service running every day. Is that the same as baloo on KDE?
It’s a very minor security issue, but it does create a database of all your filenames. It does not take too much creativity to think of ways how such a database could be used against you if it somehow leaked.