this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
-13 points (24.0% liked)

Open Source

30379 readers
564 users here now

All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!

Useful Links

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I have macbook air with M1 chip, I wish I could change to linux but unfortunately I cant so I try to stick as much as possible to using open source on macos. But i cant understand why FOSS apps take up so much space in memory. I'm even getting messages that says that I dont have space left in memory and i must close apps, and I thought that chip M1 was enough with 8gb of ram. I send a pic of my memory usage.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

This isn't exactly true. My guess is your app profiles are either bloated, and/or your measuring your RAM usage incorrectly/unfairly.

On my M1 MBA for instance, a fresh profile of LibreWolf (+ child processes) uses 514 MB. Compare this with a closed-source browser like Opera (fresh profile) which takes up a massive 1183 MB. Vivaldi uses a but lesser RAM compared to LW, but it's still a comparable amount (486 MB), whereas the new and fancy Arc browser uses 587.3 MB.

Now, LibreOffice on the other hand does take up more RAM than MS Office by default - 475.4 MB - but it works a bit differently to MSO, because LO uses a single binary for all office applications, unlike MSO where each office application is it's own app. But if I were to open a blank Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, and a blank LO Writer, Calc, Impress documents, they use approximately the same amount of RAM in total (~750 MB).