As title says I thought I would just try KaOS as I find my little AMD A6 seems to get a bit bogged down at times, and man is it responsive. After boot it was only using 600mb! After boot my Kubuntu 15.04 is using about 1.6Gb, why such a huge difference, is there a way of making it use less as I dont want to change OS? What memory footprint are others seeing? ( I checked both using KSysGuard)
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I'm on a clean boot with Firefox (5 tabs including some heavy ones), dolphin, dropbox and konsole open (and some widgets) and the memory footprint is 979MB in Plasma 4. Given the memory use ksysguard is reporting, that means a clean boot would be under 500MB. If you still like kubuntu but don't like the large memory footprint of 15.05, you could just stick to 14.10 and plasma 4 (and update your kernel and mesa if you wanted). -
In my view - if you have a slower, low memory machine you should be running a "lighter" OS like KaOS. You can still come here for advice and questions: KDE is KDE (mostly) and no one snubs other OSs here. A brief glance at KaOS reveals 1500+ packages vs. our 72000+ so you're giving up variety for leanness. Absolutely nothing wrong with that if what's offered meets your needs.
If you want to spend some time learning, why not start paring down your Kubuntu install and see how it goes? I'd start with packages - removing all that you don't need. Then, look for memory hogs (plasma desktop effects, browsers, etc.) and see where you can trim.
BTW, note that the "free" command shows buffers as well as what's being actually used. My 8GB machine shows 7549MB as used (5918 as cached). In my case, a big part of the reserved memory is due to me mounting temp space in RAM rather than on the drives. It's natural for your system to be running near full as that's the most efficient use of RAM. You really don't need to worry much about it until you start swapping to disk space - then it really slows down.
Here's a good test: Boot to KaOS. After log in, open only a terminal, then type "free" in it and note the numbers. Then boot to Kubuntu and compare. If there's a big difference, then look at your desktop settings as they're eating RAM. If not, you might try different programs (Midori instead of Chrome or Firefox, etc.).Comment
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Thanks I will give that a go, I was just shocked at how much RAM is consumed just after boot. I thought Plasma 5 was more optimised and faster overall, thats why I moved from KDE 4. From what I could see the only package that is not in KaOS that I would need is TVHeadend other than that looks like it has everything I need, but I have never been on a rolling release before. I do like the fact that Kubuntu is easy to use and has lots of packages to work with (Everyone build for ubuntu). Looking at KsysGuard the biggest memory footprint is plasma-desktop around 300mb my old plasma 4 only uses about 100mb and that has way more going on!Comment
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Yeah, the "rolling" vs. "release" distro debate is as old as linux is. I really don't like the 6-month redux with *buntus so I just skip every other release usually.
The rolling release can be better IMO, if it's done well. I might just try KaOS now that I see it. Any chance if you know whether or the installer supports btrfs?Comment
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I think it does if you do it 'manually'Comment
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