KDE Neon User Edition 5.6 Is Released So You Can Easily Experience Plasma 5.6

[starshipeleven]

I think that will be the case with "real" distros which are loading some other apps. My experience with KDE showed somwhere 450-500Mb after login... Don't hesitate and try this neon build on your usb flash drive and see how fast it is. I had the feeling of using some minimalist DE

Yeah, I'm going to try it out in the weekend.

Well, your question was pointless.

Here, take another cookie.

Neon currently has next to no apps installed by default so any figure I would come up with is not comparable to anything else.

Yes it is, it shows what the pure DE is doing on its own.

It's nice to know that out there we can still find people that does not understand what a reference point is.

And worrying about RAM usage is usually an exercise in futility.

On my 16GB xeon-ECC-pro-OP-Turbo workstation probably (although I'm also using it for other things and I don't like to waste its RAM), on my 4-soldered-GB (actually 3.5-ish because someone at ASUS is a jerk and hardcoded 512 MB of that to the iGPU of the cheap crappy APU) laptop, it is.

Also, I have plenty of older crappier PCs with less than 3 GB too, I'd like to not have them swap for lulz.

It's been discussed before (right here on Phoronix): all DEs use about 500MB and a couple of spartan ones use even less.

unless this became a universal physics law like thermodynamics or the 11th Commandment "thy linux DE shall neverth use much more than 500 MBs" while I wasn't watching, keeping this in check every now and then is ok.

I'm not one of those that rages HARD (I know a few) about the fact that linux mint mate menu on MATE is using 60 MB on its own, but when the whole PC on idle is using 750-800 MB while doing nothing when without the GUI it's using less than 100 MB I start worrying a bit about things getting out of hand.

[dajomu]

Maybe I am wrong, but really is a good thing that the DE is using RAM. If it needs to load everything from harddrive every time it needs something, it would be very slow. So it doesn't matter how much RAM a DE uses (please avoid any intentional misunderstanding), but what it does with it.

[starshipeleven]

Maybe I am wrong, but really is a good thing that the DE is using RAM. If it needs to load everything from harddrive every time it needs something, it would be very slow. So it doesn't matter how much RAM a DE uses (please avoid any intentional misunderstanding), but what it does with it.

You are right, but the "used" stat I'm looking at is the RAM that is currently in use and must remain in use for the program(s) to work at all.
This cannot be freed if another program needs it, it can go in swap space and then trash performance since swap is slow.

The thing you are talking about is RAM caching, where more is indeed good, as it's non-critical and if a program actually needs that RAM space can use it.
In the stats above it is "buff/cache" and is 820 MB, in my PCs is around a GB and can climb much higher than that but it is irrelevant since it is still technically usable.

The more a program can keep in expendable RAM cache the better.

[carewolf]

The folks making Neon are Kubuntu.

I thought it was Blue Systems.