FIRST POST, yipee! I have Shader pre-caching disabled in steam, I’ve set both my game and steam to use proton experimental, my computer is up to date on updates and so are my Nvidia Drivers. But when I boot a game my CPU still shoots up to 99 - 100% usage (tested on The Finals, & Repo), I went on vacation for 1 week and it loaded my games just fine before. In fact before I updated my computer The Finals was running half decent with a small performance dip. Now when I boot The Finals I get to around 20% preloading shaders and then I get this error “Steam has been terminated by the Linux kernel because the system is low on memory. Consider closing unused applications or browser tabs.” I’m running EndeavourOS KDE Plasma and am new to the Linux operating system so you can assume that I don’t know much of anything and I wont be offended. Any help is appreciated.
Hi, welcome to the forum 
It would be good if you could provide more information about your system so people can help you better. Hardware specs, available RAM, etc. At first glance, it looks like a swap issue. Are you using swap on disk or zram? What’s the output of free -h?
Hello Albersc2, thanks for replying and welcoming me! wasn’t at my computer so ill be faster to reply now. After some sleuthing this is what I’ve come up with.
GPU: GeForce RTX 3070
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600, 6-Core
Local Storage: total: 2.05 TiB used: 379.13 GiB (18.0%)
System RAM: total: 32 GiB available: 31.27 GiB used: 4.75 GiB (15.2%)
This is quite strange with 32 GB of RAM — but your swap looks really small (only about 500 MiB). Even with plenty of RAM, Linux still needs a few gigabytes of swap for stability in some scenarios. You might want to increase it to 4–8 GB, or better yet, use zram (for example, 8 GB of zram). That could prevent the OOM killer from terminating Steam.
so does that mean I need to buy new ram?
Not at all! You definitely don’t need more RAM — you just need to configure your swap properly. There are several ways to do that.
enlighten me, Great Albersc the Wizard of Distros… 
There’s tons of information online about how to do this. The best thing is to read up on it yourself and find what works best for you. Personally, I use zram-generator, and I configure it with something like this:
[zram0]
zram-size = 8192
compression-algorithm = zstd
swap-priority = 100
Then I fine-tune a lot of other parameters like vm.swappiness, vm.page-cluster, vm.vfs_cache_pressure, dirty ratios, etc., but that’s more of a personal preference.
heya albersc2 following the official guide here sorry to be a bother, im stuck on step 3 and doesnt seem to want to activate. Ive tried running both commands together and seperate. Any thoughts? Really apperciate ya brotha.
[ 6.114641] zram_generator::config[616]: No configuration found.
[ 255.405042] zram_generator::config[10602]: No configuration found.
[ 579.958219] zram: Added device: zram0
Show us your:
swapon --show
And disable your current swap.
sudo swapoff -a
If the swap is a partition, you’ll also need to disable it in /etc/fstab by commenting out (#) its corresponding line. Reboot. (Be careful with this step, and don’t touch anything in /etc/fstab if you’re not sure).
Then
sudo nano /etc/systemd/zram-generator.conf
and paste this:
[zram0]
zram-size = 8192
compression-algorithm = zstd
swap-priority = 100
ctrl+o and ctrl+x
and then
sudo sysctl --system
sudo systemctl daemon-reexec
sudo systemctl restart systemd-zram-setup@zram0
and again
swapon --show
It should show something like this:
swapon --show
NAME TYPE SIZE USED PRIO
/dev/zram0 partition 8G 4K 100
these 2 commands showed nothing in the terminal. USED in swap –show is still zero. 
God bless you for dealing with my stupidity… follow up do yall have like a discord or somethin?
NAME TYPE SIZE USED PRIO
/dev/zram0 partition 8G 0B 100
Don’t worry, everything looks fine. Those commands don’t print anything if they succeed, and USED 0B is normal — your system hasn’t needed to use swap yet because you have plenty of RAM. Your zram swap is active and ready.
Please show me this
cat /etc/systemd/zram-generator.conf
this
cat /sys/block/zram0/stat
and this
systemctl status systemd-zram-setup@zram0
first one says no file in directory
second one is all 0’s
[foxtrot@archlinux ~]$ cat /sys/block/zram0/stat
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
last one
○ systemd-zram-setup@zram0.service - Create swap on /dev/zram0
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/systemd-zram-setup@.service; static)
Drop-In: /run/systemd/generator/systemd-zram-setup@zram0.service.d
└─bindings.conf
Active: inactive (dead) since Thu 2025-11-13 14:55:41 MST; 6min ago
Duration: 6min 14.925s
Invocation: 9168a4cd2b404098b55d05a9b3f025a5
Docs: man:zram-generator(8)
man:zram-generator.conf(5)
Main PID: 88859 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Mem peak: 2M
CPU: 35ms
Nov 13 14:49:26 archlinux systemd[1]: Starting Create swap on /dev/zram0…
Nov 13 14:49:26 archlinux systemd-makefs[88860]: /dev/zram0 successfully formatted as swap (label “zram0”, uuid 18147b36-8fa1-4d06>
Nov 13 14:49:26 archlinux systemd[1]: Finished Create swap on /dev/zram0.
Nov 13 14:55:41 archlinux systemd[1]: Stopping Create swap on /dev/zram0…
Nov 13 14:55:41 archlinux systemd[1]: systemd-zram-setup@zram0.service: Deactivated successfully.
Nov 13 14:55:41 archlinux systemd[1]: Stopped Create swap on /dev/zram0.
Please double-check the steps. Make sure you created the file in the location I told you:
sudo nano /etc/systemd/zram-generator.conf
It’s important that you do it in that directory, not in the one mentioned in the other guide.
that would explain ctrl +x isnt working idk how that even happens…
ctrl+o →save
ctrl+x →exit
ok its there now 
Ok, let’s see if it works. If not, it could be a conflict with another swap that you haven’t properly disabled. I’m going to sleep now, it’s late. Good luck with this, and let me know if it finally works.
sleep well freind im gonna grind this out
yea i got it to work ig, but it did not fix the problem at all.