Hello, I have been using cachyos and gnome for a long time but I switched to kde because I didn’t like the performance of the new version of gnome and I wanted a change. kde was said to use less ram but on my system it used 300-400 mb more ram than gnome. I tried turning off baloorunner and desktop effects but the result didn’t change much. That’s why I’m creating this post, how can I optimize the performance and ram usage of the system in general? If you can leave some suggestions or a guide in the comments about this, it would be good for me and future users who are researching this, thank you to everyone who will help in advance.
i would not worry about measuring ram usage as linux in general and KDE in partiular are very good at managing memory and making it available when needed.
how much it’s using at any given moment is far less important than how quickly it gives up that ram to other uses when asked.
unless you are running out of ram this should not even be on your radar.
Generally, RAM comes in multiples of 8 GiB, and I’m very happy with two sticks.
Remember, KDE doesn’t ‘use’ your RAM, it just borrows it… and by far the best way to ‘optimise’ your RAM is to have it more than 80% full all the time…
The only interesting metric is whether you have enough headroom to do what you need - VM’s and the like are hungry, which is why many folks have far more RAM than they need.
from my experience 32GB is not enough for a daily driver. Ive built a new system with 96GB and so far i havent exceeded more than 70% of usage. And yes, now i can open more than one browser tab. Multitasking is great again!
The amount of RAM used depends on many things, but the most impactful are probably:
the amount of RAM available on the system
the RAM used by services running in the background
For example, when I used to use a 4GB machine at $previousjob, a whole Plasma session would use between 400 MB and 700 MB at idle-after-boot depending on the amount of services running, and now that I have a 32 GB machine it uses 2.7 GB.
Part of the memory usage perception can also be caused by different monitor software calculating memory differently. If you’re going to compare RAM usage on Plasma and GNOME, be sure to use the same software (either free -m, Plasma System Monitor, or GNOME System Monitor, but not a mix of them).
Aside from disabling background services like baloo or akonadi, not much you can do from Plasma. Outside Plasma, you can take a look at systemd-analyze blame --user and systemd-analyze blame. For example, if you see these in the list but you know you won’t ever be using firewalld, assistive technologies like Orca (TTS), XWayland Video Bridge, KDE Connect or VMWare Client / VirtualBox Client at home, you can probably uninstall those. But at that point you might enter “I may break my system” territory, so don’t ever uninstall stuff you’re not sure is safe to remove.
Disabling animations doesn’t actually do much to improve performance on Plasma, but increasing the animation speed until the animation doesn’t show up at all might make it feel faster.