[alyandon]

It's the web browser and electron based apps that are the primary consumers of ram on my desktops with the DE and OS ram usage being minimal by comparison.

I have an ancient laptop from 2008 with 4GB of ram that runs a modern KDE desktop and related applications just fine that I use for troubleshooting stuff. However, the moment I open a web browser it basically falls to pieces.

I hate everything about this. :-/

[ValdikSS]

That's easy to fix:

    Step 1:

    sudo tee /etc/tmpfiles.d/mglru.conf <<EOF
    w-      /sys/kernel/mm/lru_gen/enabled          -       -       -       -       y
    w-      /sys/kernel/mm/lru_gen/min_ttl_ms       -       -       -       -       300
    EOF
    
    Step 2:
    
    
    apt install zram-tools
    sed -i 's/#PERCENT=.*/PERCENT=130/' /etc/default/zramswap

[alyandon]

I'm on an older LTS kernel so no support for lru_gen but I will definitely check out zramswap - thanks.

[ValdikSS]

Then also do this:

    echo vm.page-cluster=0 >> /etc/sysctl.d/85-swappiness.conf

[lproven]

> I have an ancient laptop from 2008 with 4GB of ram that runs a modern KDE desktop

Try Alpine Linux, with Xfce which can do most of the same things. Then enable swap compression -- add this to the end of the kernel line in your bootloader:

zswap.enabled=1

This compresses everything going to swap, and decompresses it coming back: less disk reads and writes, and less space used.

Everything gets quicker.

[whatevaa]

People are saying that 8GB for Android phone is too small. All of those applications are not electron either.

There is bloat everywhere.

[dTal]

4GB still seems excessive, by at least one and probably several orders of magnitude, for what vanilla KDE actually does: browse files, manage windows, and edit text. And KDE is one of the best modern options.

[alyandon]

KDE doesn't need 4 GB of ram - that's just what my laptop happens to have which is more than ample to run the OS + KDE + native applications.