slackware 14.1 kde

Attached Thumbnails

   

Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off,
And let thine eye look like a friend on Slackware.

7 GB of swap!? You must be rich! :^)
That looks pretty cozy. A very out-of-your-face KDE.

My 'wallpaper' is just blank/black since I never see it.
¡Viva Alt+Tab!!!

Attached Thumbnails

 

Nice Nice

This is a computer that I'm getting up and running still. though the main computer just has less boxes and sharper pictures from GPU... Though nouveau default is nice!

Attached Thumbnails

 

Nice, old-school with twm.

To anyone even close to 7GB of Swap - Welcome to Linux whose scheduling and memory management is so superior to Windows that a PC with just 4GB of RAM rarely needs more than 300MB of Swap. For years (and for some crazy reason) Microsoft has recommended creating Swap in direct (rather than inverse!) proportion to RAM. That is exactly "bass ackwards" but given Windoze memory leaks and sloppy preloading I suppose it reduces tech service calls. Anyway, again, Welcome to Linux.

Then there's me... chugging along with 8GB of swap (with another 8GB on reserve that I can swapon when needed -- and sometimes, it is needed) with 8GB of RAM (max of motherboard). free currently shows 233MB of free RAM (4224MB cached) and 6GB of free swap.

Please, I have 16G of swap (heck, on an SSD, even,) for the case where I have to hibernate my X220. It also works well when I have to build a few Android apps while having several browsers and tabs running.

Very basic, new installation, xfce setup...

Attached Thumbnails

 

2 members found this post helpful.

OMG I suppose I am always going to need to remember the relationship between Swap and Hibernate. Sorry about that but I just don't relate. On the extremely rare occasion that I use a laptop it is always "plugged in". I have never run any manner of computing device outside of a phone and electronic meters on battery power in my life so I'm afraid I always forget that aspect. So if you just exclude Hibernation my numbers still hold ie: Swap should be inversely proportional to RAM..

Please tell me, bassmadrigal, that when you are talking about 8G Swap, you are speaking of a hibernating device. If not, please explain what you do that requires so much temporary memory.

Also, zakame, obviously (once reminded) I understand hibernation swap space, but please tell me how a few browsers, even with 50 tabs each open, chews up 8GB RAM?

No. Read this: http://www.etalabs.net/overcommit.html

Personally I don't 100% agree with that page's conclusions. If you just have a domestic desktop pc where you never do anything unusual, overcommitted swap is fine. If you have a server box that does one job and does it well, overcommited swap is fine. But not everybody leads such a sheltered life. If you need to edit huge 32 bit GeoTIFFs, or run a couple of VMs, or tune django and uwsgi and elasticsearch for your day job, you need to know for sure that the system has somewhere to throw your biggest processes.

Swap? That's still a thing?


Anyway here's my spectacular desktop.

Nice. Very nice.
(we need a "thumbs up" smilie)

No, I never hibernate my desktop. I tend to be very "multitask" oriented (actually, very ADD and I tend to never finish projects). I can easily have several browser windows open, each with many open tabs. I also have different browsers open to test various things (I use Chrome normally, but I also use Firefox, Chromium, Opera, and Konqueror -- or is it Dolphin... I can never remember). I also sometimes have a few java programs running (Filebot, which is java based, tends to use at least 1GB, but I've seen it as high as 3GB when I've moved a lot of media), along with several services. Sometimes I'll have a VM or 3 up, then throw in a couple of compiles with a few other programs open, and that memory (and swap) usage can go up rather quickly.

There were a few times when I was getting painfully close to my 8GB RAM and 8GB swap limits, so I created another 8GB swap file that I can swapon as needed, but it isn't very common.

Keep in mind, I know my usage is not normal, and I don't tell people to set aside as much swap as I have, but know there are still cases out there that warrant extra swap (especially when their hardware prevents increasing the RAM -- my system is over 8 years old now... I really want to upgrade, but I think I may wait until AMD's Zen is released). For most users who don't know any better, I'll recommend 2GB and then, if hibernation is expected, to add their amount of RAM to that 2GB. The majority of standard users who have 8GB of RAM or more likely need no swap, but I still just stick with my 2GB (+ RAM, if needed) suggestion as a generic thing.

More of the same, with higher resolution

P.S. While we are off-topic, I stopped hibernating a while ago, and gave up on swap recently. Trying out the "one partition to hold them all" layout now, so far so good.