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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Add a bunch of fat, semi-desktop binaries that actually provide some kind of functionality to make it remotely comparable, and then you just have a worse, fatter system that runs hot and wastes the battery.
Android is a unified system working together to make the device race to sleep as fast as possible, with as few wakeups as feasible (e.g. batch together events that would wake up the device).
Lighter as SXMO will run on a low budget 1GB of RAM armv7 handheld released in 2014 (maybe even 512MB of RAM), even without 3D acceleration and Android 17 just won't, no matter how much you tweak it
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.
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)
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
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.