Yeah, I had similar problems. I like gnome-shell, but I inevitably give up on it every time I try it. Maybe w/ 16gb, it's fine, but with 4gb it was unbearable. Gnome-shell itself would consume >20% of my ram, over time. I had to alt+f2 -> r[estart] gnome-shell frequently just to regain ram. If I had just gnome-shell with minimal extensions + firefox open, my system could enter swap hell. Plasma was lighter than gnome-shell, although recently I've been hitting more swapping problems, yet again. Never as bad as when on gnome-shell though. I think its javascript engine just consumes a TON of memory, which is largely what makes firefox and chrome so heavy as well (stupid. javascript. Come on.). This week, I moved back to a heavily customized xfce4, and all is well. In the end, I'm sure it would be usable if my laptop didn't suck (it's many, many years old, 4gb of ram, core i3). But it's frustrating that the interface itself consumes so much ram that only one other app can reasonably be opened at a time. If I opened slack on gnome shell, I have to prepare for a REISUB (or, in the least, a RF) to escape swap hell. My 16gb desktop doesn't care what's running though, obviously. More ram, better life. Nonetheless, 4gb SHOULD be more than enough for an environment + ONE web browser; but that's the world we live in. Devs care much less about using ram efficiently, more about using all the ram it can; the user 'can always buy more'. On 02/06/2018 05:10 PM, Florijan Hamzic via arch-general wrote:

Hi Giovanni,

I also use gnome shell and love it, I don't have any lags or memory problems. Tbh in the last 2-4 years it's the most productive thing i have.

Most of time I am running chromium (100tabs + YouTube), pycharm, gedit, lot of shells, MySQL Workbench and have several services running (sphinx, mariadb).

Running these things very fluently on a i7 4700 with 16gb ram and standard OCZ SSD. Especially IDE takes a lot of RAM and Visual Studio is well known on windows not to spare with it.

I have the same software setup on a Intel NUC with i3 and 8gb RAM. But with kodi, retroarch and a lot of instances node, cherrypy, mariadb instances. I don't use a IDE on it but whenever I do things on it it runs smoothly.

I would check the RAM and SSD, what setup do you have?

Giovanni Santini via arch-general schrieb am Di., 6. Feb. 2018, 23:09:

...

Good evening, I am writing here since I do believe people here might have found solutions already to my problems.

Sadly, I am the problem, as I love GNOME Shell (ops). Jokes aside, I love its interface and behaviour; although, it is really hard to use it on a real-context basis for me. What it happens is that if I execute RAM-consuming applications, GNOME Shell behaves really badly, swapping a lot with memory.

The usual scenario is me trying to send some e-mails, while I have Visual Studio Code and Firefox for some coding; usually, this leads to huge slowdown, up to making the system unusable.

This doesn't happen when using a GNOME-friendly i3 session, executing by far many more RAM-consuming applications (such as running Franz with multiple services, Telegram Desktop and others).

I got some good boosts from the following actions: - Disabling almost all the Shell extensions, except for my 'essential' ones. - Using a X11 session instead of Wayland - Tweaking swap and VFS parameters (there is a web article referenced in the ArchWiki which is really good)

So I have two questions: 1. Am I nuts? Did I do something really bad to my GNOME Shell without knowing that? How could I repair my setup? 2. If this is it (GNOME Shell is TOO heavy), is there any lightweight DE that offers something similar? I would need at least the search within apps and files for sure.

Thanks in advance for replies and sorry for such a long message.

-- Giovanni Santini My blog: http://giovannisantini.tk My code: https://git{hub,lab}.com/ItachiSan My GPG: 2FADEBF5

Good evening, Thank you so much for your input; it is really appreciated. For you information, I am using a (kinda old) Acer E1-570G, which has 4GB of RAM and a i5 3337 CPU. Thanks for the suggestion regarding the Plasma DE, I never heard of it before; I will try to give it a shot, considering XFCE (which was suggested) as possible fallback. I am also interested in Michael's setup; except for ZRam, did you use anything else? Thanks again to everyone! -- Giovanni Santini My blog: http://giovannisantini.tk My code: https://git{hub,lab}.com/ItachiSan My GPG: 2FADEBF5

Il 08/02/2018 00:36, strupo ha scritto:

On Wed, 7 Feb 2018 21:28:26 +0100 Giovanni Santini via arch-general wrote:

...

Thanks for the suggestion regarding the Plasma DE, I never heard of it before.

You may know it better by the name KDE.

Oh. Thanks to point it out. Am I so ignorant in the matter? Doh. -- Giovanni Santini My blog: http://giovannisantini.tk My code: https://git{hub,lab}.com/ItachiSan My GPG: 2FADEBF5

Hi, Replacing GDM for LightDM was a smart move. (You can make it look like GDM; here's a hand: https://goo.gl/WpMrYg) If you like GNOME and would still like to use it, I recommend changing vm.swappiness to a higher value (default is 60). In my case I found that changing it to 80 solved most of my unresponsive DE issues - although I use Cinnamon, and I have 8GB of RAM. YMMV. Regards Marc On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 8:39 PM, Giovanni Santini via arch-general wrote:

Hello again, Thanks to your suggestions, I decided to 1. Replace GDM with LightDM 2. Install LXDE as lightweight DE The installation was easy and I am really glad of the RAM performance obtained (I suppose GDM was the real resource hog).

These is only one small desire that is still unexpressed for me: I both have mutter and openbox locally installed and I would like to use only mutter (looks much better) when using LXDE. The problem is that I have literally no idea of how to set up its keys; from its man, I should change them from the Control Center, that is not present in LXDE (it's GNOME stuff) and I am not sure of which GNOME settings services I should execute to make it work. If anyone has any tips, please speak ahead!

Thanks again to all, anyways :)

-- Giovanni Santini My blog: http://giovannisantini.tk My code: https://git{hub,lab}.com/ItachiSan My GPG: 2FADEBF5

Be careful when clicking shortened links like "goo.gl", they can be phishing tactic linkage. On Mon, 12 Feb 2018 00:47:33 -0200 "Marcelo \"Marc\" Ranolfi via arch-general" wrote:

Hi,

Replacing GDM for LightDM was a smart move. (You can make it look like GDM; here's a hand: https://goo.gl/WpMrYg)

If you like GNOME and would still like to use it, I recommend changing vm.swappiness to a higher value (default is 60). In my case I found that changing it to 80 solved most of my unresponsive DE issues - although I use Cinnamon, and I have 8GB of RAM. YMMV.

Regards Marc

On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 8:39 PM, Giovanni Santini via arch-general wrote:

...

Hello again, Thanks to your suggestions, I decided to 1. Replace GDM with LightDM 2. Install LXDE as lightweight DE The installation was easy and I am really glad of the RAM performance obtained (I suppose GDM was the real resource hog).

These is only one small desire that is still unexpressed for me: I both have mutter and openbox locally installed and I would like to use only mutter (looks much better) when using LXDE. The problem is that I have literally no idea of how to set up its keys; from its man, I should change them from the Control Center, that is not present in LXDE (it's GNOME stuff) and I am not sure of which GNOME settings services I should execute to make it work. If anyone has any tips, please speak ahead!

Thanks again to all, anyways :)

-- Giovanni Santini My blog: http://giovannisantini.tk My code: https://git{hub,lab}.com/ItachiSan My GPG: 2FADEBF5

-- freq