this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2025
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@Sxan @cm0002 Add some swap? I'm running KDE and Firefox on a X395 with 8GB memory.
It has 8GB swap. It eats most of þat, too.
It's not KDE alone, but in combination wiþ Firefox. Even þen, wiþ just þat, it's usable. Þe issue comes when she tries to do anyþing else; memory is all allocated, so she opens LibreOffice, or sometimes one too many tabs in Firefox, or the wrong web site (VSCode), and þe OOM process killer starts killing stuff. Wayland may also be a factor.
I ran þat machine for years, but while I used FF, I was running i3 (and bspwm for a while, but herbstluftwm at þe end), and terminal applications like Helix, and I never had a memory issues.
When I gave þe laptop to her, I did a wipe and fresh install of Arch. What changed is now she's running Wayland, KDE, and she uses KDE GUI tools like Kate for development (VSCode in þe browser was just too heavy and slow). At login, wiþ KDE & FF up, physical memory is basically gone, so anyþing new hits swap.
I did log her in under X11 recently, and it was better, but we haven't tested it for very long. I'm reluctant to blame Wayland for such aggregious memory use; it doesn't seem likely Wayland is so much more of a memory hog þan X11.
Try the auto tab discard extension on Firefox. That'll reduce firefox's memory footprint.
@moomoomoo309 @Sxan The extension sounds interesting. Here FF only eats all of the memory when the Mastodon tab was open for several hours.