Does Linux use less RAM? (www.youtube.com)

submitted 2 months ago by TRex91@feddit.org to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.ml

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Games need more RAM, but prices are abysmal. Unfortunate, I know. But before you empty your wallet for an upgrade, what if the answer is switching to the penguin side? I ran two identical test benches in real-world workloads to find out if ditching Windows is the only memory upgrade you actually need.

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[-] deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de 4 points 2 months ago

Or no desktop environment at all. Depending on your needs, you can get GUI base usage down to under 100MB. Usually you'll sit much higher than that though, to support many of the features you need like audio.

[-] dzsimbo@sopuli.xyz 4 points 2 months ago

Geez, tell me about it. My plasmashell starts out nice and dainty, under half a gigabyte. I check in on it two or three days later, it doubles! Can get well north of 3 gigs. I changed my animated wallpaper to a static one, but it still climbs (albeit maybe a bit slower).

The deeper I get into Linux, the more I suspect I need to understand what I'm actually doing, and not just let a distro guide my hands.

[-] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 4 points 2 months ago

Note, that depending on how you measure it that additional RAM might still be available for other apps, if needed.

[-] dzsimbo@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 months ago

Well, it's the resource manager telling me that plasmashell is bloating. I'm slowly saying goodbye to desktop widgets, but so far it hasn't been the prime suspects.

I'm also pretty sure that that RAM has been eaten, cuz I do get heavy page file usage as well, but thanks for the input!

[-] luthis 4 points 2 months ago

Is it possible to run steam like that?

[-] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 5 points 2 months ago

That's what the Steam Deck and Steam Machine (and probably Steam Frame) do. They have a lightweight Wayland compositor called gamescope to run the Steam UI and games on.

this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2026

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