[leeview]

While I respect other people's option for FreeBSD (I tried it several times), in my ~3 years experience using Ubuntu Unity (from 11.04-14.10) I never had low memory or unreasonable swapping (swap is zero 99% of the time I check). My laptop has 3GB of RAM and I was always impressed with how little memory my usual session (1-5 apps + Firefox/Chrome with 5-10 open tabs max) consumed compared to windows: the average memory load was around 33% of the 2.7GB available = ~1GB. For some time I was using virtualbox with 1.5GB RAM allocated to it and I still didn't use all the RAM available and the swapping was minimal if not 0. My conclusion: I'm highly sceptical that Linux memory management is bad enough to justify giving up the ease of installation and the minimal configuration & tweaking Ubuntu needs after install.

[srean]

To give a counterpoint, I frequently get into trouble with Linux 3.12.6. If I open more than a few tabs (70 say, with FF I can do an order of magnitude more) in Chrome it maxes out on memory to the point of the system becoming useless. Funnily enough it actually maxes out on swap space even though there is RAM available and then starts thrashing like crazy. Setting swappiness alleviates this somewhat but not entirely. Its a box with 1 GB ram + 1 GB swap. Not big by current standards, but has more than plenty RAM in my opinion if it werent for the tendency to write bloatware these days.

Yeah I could get some more RAM, but this box is a good testbed for software with a leaner streak, bloat does not excite me as much, sorry. Funnily enough this seems to offend a whole lot of people, as if I owe it to them to have more RAM on my m/c. It is probably worth it just for that amusement.

Definitely interested in giving *BSD a shot. The thing that has stopped me so far is the difficulty in sharing data between them.

EDIT @DanBC

> 70 tabs is not normal and 700 is just, well, weird.

So I have been told :)

Firefox manages it well enough though, I would assume Dillo would too. Dont want to hijack the thread with why I abuse tabs so, but I still contend that 1 GB is enough if the code is tight. 1 GB is a huge freaking load of memory if you think about it.

[DanBC]

70 tabs is not normal and 700 is just, well, weird. It's great to run a machine with "low" amounts of RAM but you shouldn't then complain if it does weird things.

I'd be interested in what happens if you run 700 Dillo instances?

[segmondy]

70 tabs is normal. I actually have exactly 71 right now, and that's because I opened a new tab to view this discussion.

[Touche]

Sidebar, but everyone mistakenly thinks things that they do are therefore normal. I think the difference between "normal" and "common" is a little vague. If you define "normal" the same as "common" then we could do a study and see if it is normal or not (my guess is that it is not). However "normal" can also be defined as "not unreasonable", in which case I would agree, 71 tabs is normal.

[DanBC]

70 tabs is only normal in the group of people reading HN. Other normal things for that group of people would be having a compiler installed on their OS. Would you describe having an installed compiler as normal for the general computer-using population?

I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of computer users don't ever have more than 5 tabs open at any time.

[Touche]

I'm willing to bet that some non-trivial percentage of computer users are unaware that tabs exist, and do not use them period.

[Someone]

"Would you describe having an installed compiler as normal for the general computer-using population?"

Totally off-topic, but Yes :-)

.Net has a compiler built-in (you may need the SDK to get the command-line version), many systems have a compiler for a shader language, and your packet filter may ship with one.

[justincormack]

70 tabs is perfectly normal.