Hello,

I installed Debian 12 with the KDE desktop environment a few days ago. I am using the sweet global theme and I have a few widgets installed.

One thing I've been kind of surprised at is that it uses a lot of ram. I also understand that I am not using the most lightweight setup and I don't mind to use some ram to make things pretty and convenient. But I idle at 3 gigs with basically nothing open (see images), which is, like, windows-level. Is that normal? I don't mind that much if it's how it's supposed to be, but I just want to be sure that there's not something funky going on. I have linked some screenshots of the system monitor for reference.

https://imgur.com/a/zX2Zs4Y

Thank you.

Post the output of the command:

free -m

https://www.linuxatemyram.com/

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Thanks for the reply! The output of the command is as follows:

total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 15345 3831 9622 61 2281 11513
Swap: 976 0 976

If I understand correctly, I should look to the "available" column to see how much ram is really being used and if that's the case, still seems 3-4 gigs. I ran this with no programs open in the background.

To be clear, it is not as though I am low on ram or anything, I have 16 gigs installed, so using 3-4 gigs at idle is not the end of the world. But I want to make sure that it is expected, as opposed to something having gone wrong.

Because you have so much avaialable is the simple answer.

KDE will take a lot of ram if there's a lot available in order to ensure that you get a smooth experience. If you had very little ram, it wouldn't use so much (KDE's actually surprisingly efficient nowadays), but there is plenty, so it reserves a fair portion in order to ensure a good user experience.

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We keep getting these types of questions ... so try this.

You've got a large back lawn, and want to put up some swings/slides for the kids. Not wanting to clutter the entire lawn, you put them over to one side. Over time they get moved around, and take up a bit more space. No problem, plenty there for the family to relax in.
Then one day you want to put up a marquee to have some people around - but the swings are now in the way. Move them back to the side and on we go. When the marquee gets taken down, the cycle starts again.

How is any of this a problem ?.

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It's a common fallacy, in that users see memory as something that shouldn't be used. For many I think it goes back to their Windows days where some misbehaving programme would consume a lot, or tons of unnecessary services, start up applications, applets, tray apps, etc would hog a lot of memory, then Windows Update would start doing its thing and that would bring the computer to its knees.

The browser cache is a good example. The cache grows as you use the browser and visit different sites. We see threads now and then where "firefox is using 4GB!?" or whatever. Often these threads go on for quite a few posts and the person still fails to grasp what is going on - often getting irate and demanding to know why firefox is using so much RAM.

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Thank you for the responses, everyone! Seems like there's nothing to worry about, then.

Operating systems are designed to be "opportunistic," and "lazy." RAM is a resource to be used to its fullest extent. If there is no pressure being exerted on the memory resource, the OS will do nothing to "clean it up." Only when, and if, "pressure" actually begins to manifest will it begin to do things like "swapping," or identifying not-recently-used memory and recovering it to be used for some other process. Otherwise, there is no motivation to do so.

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If you have little, and configure Plasma not to autostart every background process and bling element it knows how, you can get its usage down quite a bit:32bit also helps reduce overall usage.

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the usual answer is: www.linuxatemyram.com, see the first response. Additionally there is a link at the bottom of that page: "How can I verify these things?"
If you really want to know the details about memory management on linux probably you can check this: https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in...e-of-swap.html
and the official documentation: https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/mm/index.html

But in short, you are right, that's how it's designed to work, nothing to worry about.

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