[awestroke]

Seemed interesting until I read that Phosh pulls in GNOME - gnome-settings, gnome-session etc. Seems like a very strange bundle to bring in for an extremely power constrained device, where every % of increased battery drain is noticed by the user

[gf000]

Why? What's particularly heavy in these gnome tools?

Like the particular programs are no issue, but the whole UNIX-userspace as done in the mainframe era and still is. Like you definitely need cooperative program suspend/resume like on Android for any kind of sane battery life, but that's unfortunately completely missing in case of GNU/Linux.

[seba_dos1]

> What's particularly heavy in these gnome tools?

Nothing. On my phone there's 770MB RAM consumed by the entire system with Phosh running right now. The rest is free to be eaten by the browser.

If anything, it's GTK that can be rather inefficient when it comes to rendering (both GTK3 and GTK4, but for different reasons). There are some tricks that phoc (Phosh's compositor) could still learn too, but it will get there.

[tim-projects]

Gnomes' a massive memory hog

I was looking at this and thinking maybe it would improve a cheap android phone. But now I know it's running gnome I won't even consider trying

[gf000]

> maybe it would improve a cheap android phone.

Not in a million worlds. Android is by far the most optimized OS (as a whole, including user space, graphics stack everything) for mobile devices. It's almost like the most widely used mobile operating system has had quite a bit of dev hours spent on it.

[belowavgiq]

Trust me, you wouldn't be saying this if you had actually tried modern Android on low powered devices. low-mid range phones drop frames more often in 2026 than they did in 2015 with Android 5-7's much simpler UI.

edit: oops, the topic was RAM usage. in 2026. of course everyone, it's definitely the 200MB usage surplus that makes your phone feel heavy. let's add 1TB of RAM to a C2D and it will be ready to be paired with a 5090.

[impure-aqua]

> of course everyone, it's definitely the 200MB usage surplus that makes your phone feel heavy.

It actually is though? My Pixel 9a has a perfectly serviceable CPU but I am often frustrated by its 8GB of RAM. Switching to the Revolut app to generate a disposable card number consistently evicts my browser tab from RAM. ~100% of the time this happens and I get extremely frustrated by it losing my state in the checkout flow.

[gf000]

Well, the market has consistently raised the low end of what constitutes "decent" hardware for a smartphone, and it really is not expensive today to have good enough hardware.

Why should software not adapt to reality?

As another data point, take a look at what "embedded" development means today. It is increasingly common to just simply have a device running full Linux, as it is getting cheap enough to do so.

[gcr]

Every desktop environment is a massive memory hog. Do you really want something minimal like xfce on a touchscreen?

[zzril]

SXMO is pretty minimal in that regard, but it doesn't force you to use the touchscreen. Can also navigate through menus via the volume buttons...

[gf000]

Even that will be a massive energy vampire compared to android, that had top notch engineers working on it for close to 2 decades...

[realusername]

Yes and no, SXMO will work without hardware acceleration, I've not tried but I doubt that Android will.

Additionally, minimum requirements of Android 17 are way above what SXMO allows.

With Phosh you would have a point but SXMO is lighter than a modern Android.

[tim-projects]

I've been using openbox for over a decade. That's completely false. Xfce is not a memory hog. And it's not minimal either it's fully functional.

Gnome is a bloated mess of a thing and I hate it. Why would anyone want their desktop to use over 1gb of ram. I have a 32gb laptop and I still loath the idea of throwing away memory on such a bloated awful thing.

Running gnome on a phone. Yeah... No

[ChocolateGod]

It doesn't run GNOME Shell, which is the main memory hog of GNOME.

It uses some GNOME services, namely so it doesn't have to invent it's own. None of these services are memory heavy and all have a purpose (e.g. managing Bluetooth)

[WD-42]

weird, I'm running GNOME on my laptop right now and I checked and it's using 275mb of ram. I would not call that particularly bloated.

[Striving7340]

Phosh is not based on gnome-shell and nobody cares if you want to run openbox on your phone.

[freedomben]

Do you have any numbers? The last numbers I remember seeing, had XFCE around 500 MB and gnome around 700 MB. I'm trying to find some current numbers, but it's a pretty tough thing.

Without any different numbers, I think saying a massive memory hog is a little hyperbolic. Applications in use, especially browsers, are going to dwarf the desktop environment anyway. Having the polish is well worth it to many people, myself included.

I would definitely like to see less memory requirements for the various desktop environments, but at the end of the day I don't pay for any of this

[Striving7340]

Phosh is not based on gnome-shell and has its own settings and apps, but it does use parts of gnome, no reason to reinvent the wheel.

> Seems like a very strange bundle to bring in for an extremely power constrained device, where every % of increased battery drain is noticed by the user

I'm sure you can make your Frankenstein version that would be 10% as usable and secure as phosh by removing everything but for most users, 100mb more ram and 1% more battery drain for an OS aiming to be a daily driver is something that's worth it.

[realusername]

It works kind of okay for recent devices as phones are very powerful nowadays, Phosh on a <2015 device is much more painful though.

[retatop]

I'm a certified gnome hater, but a phone is basically the perfect application for it. As far as resource usage goes, I have been dailying an FLX1 for a year and a half now and Firefox is the only noticeable resource hog