Games need more RAM, but prices are abysmal. Unfortunate, I know. But before you empty your wallet for an upgrade, what if the answer is switching to the penguin side? I ran two identical test benches in real-world workloads to find out if ditching Windows is the only memory upgrade you actually need.
I imagine you can also have much more choice with how to spend your RAM, such as using LXQt
Or no desktop environment at all. Depending on your needs, you can get GUI base usage down to under 100MB. Usually you’ll sit much higher than that though, to support many of the features you need like audio.
Is it possible to run steam like that?
That’s what the Steam Deck and Steam Machine (and probably Steam Frame) do. They have a lightweight Wayland compositor called gamescope to run the Steam UI and games on.
Geez, tell me about it. My plasmashell starts out nice and dainty, under half a gigabyte. I check in on it two or three days later, it doubles! Can get well north of 3 gigs. I changed my animated wallpaper to a static one, but it still climbs (albeit maybe a bit slower).
The deeper I get into Linux, the more I suspect I need to understand what I’m actually doing, and not just let a distro guide my hands.
Note, that depending on how you measure it that additional RAM might still be available for other apps, if needed.
Yes, you could get the base memory usage much lower than in the video.