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Why does open source take up so much memory space on Macos

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...

d3Xt3r,

I have macbook air with M1 chip, I wish I could change to linux but unfortunately I cant

Why not? Fedora Asahi works pretty well. When was the last time you tried it?

d3Xt3r, (edited )

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).

d3Xt3r,

For a macOS-like environment I’d also recommend Elementary OS.

d3Xt3r, (edited )

Parent comment is wrong. The default UX used in Ubuntu may actually be confusing for newbies, as it’s quite different compared to Windows. Just check some screenshots or videos and you can see for yourself. I’d instead recommend going for a distro which uses a more familiar UX (ie the Desktop Environment).

Perhaps a distro which uses KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, MATE or LXQt by default (these are “desktop environments” (DE) - which is a collection of the desktop shell components (eg start menu, taskbar, dock etc) plus default applications that go with it eg the file manager, document viewer etc). A desktop environment like the ones I mentioned above, in their default settings, should be familiar to most Windows users. Now whilst you can install any DE on any distro, it can be a daunting task for newbies, plus, the settings might not be optimal for you. So it’s better to go with a distro that comes with such easy-to-use DEs by default. Examples of such distros include Linux Mint and Zorin. These, by default, should look quite familiar to you, and should be even more easier to use than Ubuntu.

Both Mint and Zorin are based on Ubuntu, so most of the documentation for Ubuntu should be relevant to Mint and Zorin as well. But if you’re not sure, just include quotes for your distro when you’re doing a web search, eg how do I do this in Linux “Mint” will ensure you’ll only get results with “Mint” in the page.

d3Xt3r, (edited )

Yes, you can indeed install them in Windows as well. sfreerdp is the main server binary, and wfreerdp is the main client.

Here’s a full explanation of what each file does:

  1. freerdp-proxy.exe: This executable is a proxy server for RDP sessions. It’s used to forward, or ‘proxy’, RDP traffic between a client and a server. This can be useful for security, auditing, or network architectural reasons.
  2. sdl-freerdp.exe: This binary is a version of the FreeRDP client that uses the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) for its graphical output. SDL is a cross-platform development library designed to provide low-level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, and graphics hardware. This makes sdl-freerdp.exe useful for systems where a lightweight or more compatible graphical output method is needed.
  3. sfreerdp-server.exe: This is the server component of the FreeRDP project. It allows a Windows machine to act as an RDP server, accepting connections from RDP clients. This can be particularly useful for testing or for setting up remote desktop services on systems where a full-fledged RDP server isn’t available or desired.
  4. wfreerdp.exe: This executable is the standard FreeRDP client for Windows. It’s used to connect to RDP servers from a Windows machine. It provides a wide range of features and options typical of RDP clients, such as support for different color depths, audio redirection, and file system redirection.
  5. winpr-hash.exe: This tool is part of the Windows Portable Runtime (WinPR) library, which is a part of FreeRDP. It’s used to create a NTLM hash from a username and password pair. The created hash can be outputed as plain hash or in SAM format.
  6. winpr-makecert.exe: Also part of WinPR, this executable is used to create certificates. Certificates are crucial in secure communications, such as those used in RDP sessions. They are used to establish trust and encrypt data. This tool can be used to generate certificates for testing or for specific secure communication requirements within the RDP framework.
d3Xt3r,

Yes, it should work with any RDP client. And Remmina actually uses Freerdp as the backend btw. :)

d3Xt3r,

Yes, I believe so. It used to be “experimental” back in the day, not sure of its current status though.

d3Xt3r, (edited )

ThinkPad P14s AMD Gen 1

Both the laptop and the stock NVMe drive supports Opal2. Not sure about your second drive but if it also supports Opal2, then you should just use that instead of ZFS encryption, since Opal encryption is transparent to the OS, so you won’t have any issues with hibernation.

d3Xt3r,

Yes, but the whole point of using Opal2 encryption is that you don’t need to use OS-level FDE/filesystem encryption, thus simplifying your set up.

Of course, you can still use them if you want to though.

d3Xt3r,

Same here. Not just my parents, but also some of my aunts and uncles. None of them are particularly tech savvy and none of them have had any major issues.

People who claim that Linux is difficult to use, or not suitable for newbies, have no idea what they’re talking about.

d3Xt3r, (edited )

Firstly, there’s no guarantee that a document would look exactly the same even within different versions of MS Office itself. Also, try opening any complex document in MS Office on macOS for instance, and you’ll most likely notice issues or differences compared to the Windows version. In my old sysadmin job, where I used a Mac, we had a standard “change control” template that we had to fill out when doing infrastructure changes, and the radio buttons used in the form didn’t work on the macOS version of Office. So issues like this are pretty common. These sort of issues are why people either normally ignore them OR in the case that layout/formatting is critical (eg: for publishing/printing), then they’d use PDF or TeX or similar formats, where the formatting is preserved.

Secondly, as @cygnus mentioned, use OnlyOffice if MSO compatibility is important. Below is a screenshot I captured of a recreated Lorem Ipsum docx on my Linux machine, with MS Office Online (running on Edge) on the left and OnlyOffice on the right.

https://lemmy.nz/pictrs/image/a705d0b5-45c1-4fe7-ac34-a7e2b88fda48.png

As you can see, they’re virtually identical - and any difference in the sizing etc would come down to the fact that I’m running the web version of MSO, so the zoom/scaling may not exactly match that of OO. But other than that, if you check the spacing and everything else, it’s pretty accurate.

Finally, in saying that, even OO has it’s limitations and isn’t a 100% replacement for MSO - as it can’t run macros, or may not be able to display certain types of embedded objects in Excel and so on. But then, even the web and Mac versions of MS Office has these sort of limitations. But the average home user wouldn’t normally use macros or advanced features in Office, so for the most part, OO, or even LO should be fine for most users.

Also, just as a reminder, in this thread we’re discussing about how Linux can work fine for most home users, the kind of users who have simple requirements, and aren’t dependent on specific proprietary programs like Photoshop etc. Obviously Linux will not be suitable for every single need or use case out there, but neither is Windows or MacOS - if you have special needs or requirements, then use the tool that’s best for the job. But nitpicking minor differences like this isn’t helping anyone, we’d be sitting here arguing all day about how “X OS sucks because it can’t do Y”, which is a pointless exercise.

Edit: I was curious to see how bad LibreOffice actually was so I just tested it out:

https://lemmy.nz/pictrs/image/cda9e99c-df3b-43f1-bb95-5a469927befe.png

… and that was surprisingly not bad at all! Just one word out of place. But this goes to show how opensource software is ever evolving and constantly improving - so a particular criticisms you may have had in the past may no longer be applicable, unless you test it out yourself against the latest versions.

d3Xt3r,

Um… that’s NOT a refusal, it’s just a warning. Clicking on that highlighted button will save the DOCX.

To not get the warning again, all you have to do is untick the checkbox which says “ask when not saving on ODF” - it’s there right in your screenshot.

d3Xt3r, (edited )

I’d wager that it’s your scheduler. Prior to the latest kernel release (v6.6), Linux used the CFS scheduler which is outdated and not really optimal for desktop usage. As a result, many third-party alternate schedulers were developed to fix this issue, with the most recent popular ones being the System76 scheduler (used in Pop!_OS), and BORE (used in CachyOS). But this issue has been solved officially now, with the EEVDF scheduler (earliest eligible virtual deadline first scheduling), which has finally replaced CFS.

So if you’re not on 6.6, upgrade to it, or use the System76 scheduler. Also switch to Wayland if you haven’t already and you’ll notice your Linux desktop just as smooth, if not smoother, than Windows.

I have an M1 MacBook Air and a Thinkpad Z13 G1 (running Bazzite KDE with kernel 6.6.3 + System76 scheduler), and comparing the touchpad gestures and window animations side-by-side - especially the gestures and animation to switch workspaces - it’s just as smooth as macOS (at least to my eyes), and that’s quite the feat given that macOS has been the king of smooth animations and responsiveness for a long time.

d3Xt3r,

SteamOS 3 for desktop (idk when, they are probably waiting until the new open source nvidia driver is mature enough. Maybe they are waiting on wine running without xwayland too… idk

You don’t have to wait for that, when we’ve got ChimeraOS and Bazzite that work very well, and are more up-to-date and flexible compared to SteamOS.

I’m running Bazzite on both my laptop and desktop and it’s fantastic.

d3Xt3r,

For me:

  • Ability for a panel to stay visible but dodge windows, for a dock-like behavior.
  • Better/customisable touchpad gestures (rumored)
  • HDR support on Wayland
  • Simultaneous password and fingerprint authentication
  • Decoupling of icons from the Plasma theme (so ALL icons are changed when you apply a systemwide icon theme)
d3Xt3r,

Plasma 6, but just as excited for kernel 6.7 featuring:

  • bcachefs
  • AMD Seamless Boot (for flicker-free streamlined booting)
  • Scheduler improvements for better responsiveness/performance
  • IO_uring FUTEX support for better performance
  • More FUTEX2 work for potentially better gaming performance
  • Better write performance for eMMC chips (great for many IoT boards)
  • TCP network performance improvements
  • DisplayPort Alt Mode 2.1 support over Type-C
d3Xt3r,

As a gamer, you should like up-to-date more, becuse that generally translates to better performance and better compatibility with games. Things like FUTEX2, IO_URING FUTEX support, HDR, Wayland stuff and so many things are a work-in-progress, that you’d want to be on the latest and greatest otherwise you’d be missing out.

Also, stability isn’t really an issue with Bazzite since it’s an immutable OS - your updates happen in the cloud for starters, so you won’t get any “bad” updates. But on the ocassion that you do, you can in fact easily rollback to the previous image from GRUB. You can also pin a known “good” image so that it’s always available.

d3Xt3r,

Since features aren’t important to you, and since you like stability more, then technically you should like Bazzite more, because it’s more stable than Mint (at least on paper), being an immutable OS with atomic updates and built-in rollbacks

SteamOS indeed supports HDR but that’s only in game mode (ie under a gamescope session), but not in deskrop mode (Wayland). HDR support is coming to KDE Wayland with Plasma 6 early next year, but if you’re still on Mint, you’d have to wait a lot longer to get Plasma 6.

d3Xt3r,

Initial benchmarks show better performance than btrfs (at least for some workloads), but more importanty, I like that it offers tiered/cache storage - so you can use a fast and small drive (NVMe) to speed up a slow and bigger drive (HDD). You can do that with ZFS as well of course, but it doesn’t have the massive RAM requirements. Also it’s much more easier to set up and configure in comparison.

d3Xt3r,

I would like to create my first ublue spin as there only is Fedora Sericea currently

Have you looked at Hyprgreen? It should be exactly what you’re after.

github.com/hyprgreen/

d3Xt3r,

If you see the word “LILO” during your windows startup (just after you turn the machine on), your son has installed lunix.

Wow, that’s a blast from the past! Completely forgot that LILO used to be a thing.

d3Xt3r,

And blacklisted by Ubuntu Christian Edition.

d3Xt3r,

And here’s a customary video of metalhead nerds celebrating.

d3Xt3r,

Similar experiences here. I remember waiting for the free CDs bundles with monthly magzines, and add then I’d the CD as a mirror in my repos to update my packages lol

d3Xt3r,

It’s just a static image. At the end of every month, a guy logs into all the donation sites, punches the numbers into a calculator, calculates how many more pixels needs to be added, then fires up MS Paint and paints the progress bar and uploads it to the website. ^(/s)

Is linux good for someone tech illererate.

Now i’ve been considering moving to linux. I don’t have much of a history using a computer and find it tougher to use than my phone. But I also really appreciate the foss movement. I’ve currently got an old laptop running windows 11 I think and it would prolly speed up with linux too. But I’m afraid I’d fuck smth up...

d3Xt3r,

Are you sure about that? Most countries around the world have a Linux user group of some sort. Find out what your local group is called, get in touch and I’m sure you’ll be able to find someone who’ll be more than happy to help.

fedoraproject.org/wiki/LinuxUserGroups

If your country isn’t on the above page then Google for (your country name) “Linux User Group”

d3Xt3r, (edited )

This was already fixed in 6.1.66. Both are “old” kernels, so it’s nothing to worry about, unless you/your distro was deliberately staying on 6.1 for some odd reason (yes, I’m aware 6.1 is LTS, but so is 6.6).

d3Xt3r,

TIL about PostWatchBot, that seems handy. Thanks!

d3Xt3r,

I haven’t tested it myself but apparently it’s supported now. areweanticheatyet.com/game/planetside-2

Anti-cheat support in general has been a thing in Linux since the past couple of years, thanks to the efforts of Valve and the Steam Deck’s popularity. But not every game works though, depending on the anti-cheat system used and it’s implementation, some effort from the dev might be needed to make it compatible. areweanticheatyet.com tracks the current status of these games, and www.protondb.com is also a good reference in general to check Linux game compatibility.

d3Xt3r, (edited )

Nobara, but yea it’s a good choice for gaming.

But if you don’t have any complex software requirements besides gaming and the usual desktop apps, then Bazzite is a much, much better option. It gets updates much more earlier than Nobara (which is still stuck on Fedora 38), and is much more stable (immutable OS) and more gaming optimised. You can even boot directly into “gaming mode” for a Steam Deck-like experience, with all the same (+more) optimizations that you’d get from the Deck.

@Ultimatenab

d3Xt3r,

I have been using Windows since 3.1 with MSDOS 6.2 since forever and I have seen everything from Microsoft. At the same time I’m a senior Microsoft engineer and have been for more than a decade

Same here! Grew up using DOS and Win 3.1, and been a Windows sysadmin for a long time. But over the past few years I’ve been growing increasingly dissatisfied at the direction Microsoft’s been going in, particularly the way they’ve been shoving their half-baked cloud services (and telemetry) onto us, and enterprises, being married to MS, have no choice but forced to comply. At least, that’s the case where I live, companies just lap up every new thing Microsoft does and treat it like the next best thing since sliced bread.

I was being turned from an engineer into a middleman, a lackey at the mercy of MS, and I didn’t like it one bit. I hated the thought of having my entire career being dictated by one corporation. So I quit my job and finally managed to land a Linux role this year and I’m so much happier. To be honest, it feels a bit weird throwing away my veteran MS hat and all the knowledge that I gained over the years and going back to being a total noob (at enterprise Linux that is), but I’m also learning a lot of cool stuff, but more importantly, I love being in control of our systems again, and no longer being at the mercy at a monopolistic mega corporation.

d3Xt3r,

Thank you!

On a random note, as a fellow relic of a bygone era… remember back when Windows used to be customizable, when you could modify just about any file, change themes without a hack, without things like Trusted Installer/Defender getting in your way, or even completely replace your explorer.exe with a different shell like BlackBox? I miss those days.

Voilà:

https://lemmy.nz/pictrs/image/06550c17-1446-4acc-988f-9541fea12dc4.png

This is Linux (Debian) running locally on my Android phone (Galaxy Fold 4), with a Win95 theme. I think it’s pretty awesome that Linux still lets you do stuff like this, whilst still maintain a good security posture. And letting me relive the memories of the good ol’ days. :)

d3Xt3r,

I find wet wipes handy for that. Just chuck a packet in your pocket, and give yourself a quick wipedown when you’re in the stall.

d3Xt3r,

Holy mother of URLs, Batman!

Here’s a cleaned up version without all those nasty trackers attached: www.walmart.com/ip/…/10810917

d3Xt3r, (edited )

That link is for kernel 5.14, so I’d say those results are pretty much invalid for most users (unless you’re actually on it, or the 5.15 LTS kernel). There have been a ton of improvements in every filesystem since then, with pretty much every single kernel release.

A more relevant test would be this one - although it talks about bcachefs, other filesystems are also included in it. As you can see, F2FS is no longer the fastest - bcachefs and XFS beat it in several tests, and even btrfs beats it in some tests. F2FS only wins in the Dbench and CockroachDB benchmarks.

d3Xt3r, (edited )

Not OP, but yes, that’s pretty much how it works. (ZFS scrubs do not defrgment data however).

Fragmentation isn’t really a problem for several reasons.

  • Some (most?) COW filesystems have mechanisms to mitigate fragmentation. ZFS, for instance, uses a special allocation strategy to minimize fragmentation and can reallocate data during certain operations like resilvering or rebalancing.

  • ZFS doesn’t even have a traditional defrag command. Because of its design and the way it handles file storage, a typical defrag process is not applicable or even necessary in the same way it is with other traditional filesystems

  • Btrfs too handles chunk allocation effeciently and generally doesn’t require defragmentation, and although it does have a defrag command, it’s almost never used by anyone, unless you have a special reason to (eg: maybe you have a program that is reading raw sectors of a file, and needs the data to be contiguous).

  • Fragmentation is only really an issue for spinning disks, however, that is no longer a concern for most spinning disk users because:

    • Most home users who still have spinning disks use it for archival/long term storage/media that rarely changes (eg: photos, movies, other infrequently accessed data), so fragmentation rarely occurs here and even if it does, it’s not a concern.
    • Power users typically have a DAS or NAS setup where spinning disks are in a RAID config with striping, so the spread of data across multiple sectors actually has an advantage for averaging out read times (so no file is completely stuck in the slow regions of a disk), but also, any performance loss is also generally negated because a single file can typically be read from two or more drives simultaneously, depending on the redundancy config.
  • Enterprise users also almost always use a RAID (or similar) setup, so the same as above applies. They also use filesystems like ZFS which employs heavy caching mechanisms, typically backed by SSDs/NVMes, so again, fragmentation isn’t really an issue.

d3Xt3r,

Not quite. Bcachefs can be used on any drive, but it shines the best when you have a fast + slow drive in your PC (eg NVMe + HDD), so the faster drive can be used as a cache drive to store frequently accessed data.

spiritedpause, to linux
@spiritedpause@fosstodon.org avatar

A Sneak Peek at new linux distro Zorin OS 17

https://blog.zorin.com/2023/12/04/a-sneak-peek-at-zorin-os-17/

@linux

d3Xt3r,

At least it’s a bit more full-featured than Fedora 39, where they just updated to Gnome 45 and called it a day, and KDE users didn’t even get anything new at all.

Is the Linux Foundation Certified System Admin (LFCS) worth it?

I’ve been a software engineer for 10 years now but want to work with Linux more in a professional setting (not to mention the number of layoffs in the the dev industry has me thinking a backup plan might be a good idea). I have been using Linux exclusively on my personal machine for about 15 years now so I’m not too worried...

d3Xt3r, (edited )

It’ll really depend on your local job market. I was on a serious job hunt earlier this year and I couldn’t find a single Linux job which asked for LFCS certs. There were a couple which asked for Red Hat certs though. Of course, this could be specific to where I live, so I’d recommend looking at some popular job sites for where you live (+ remote jobs too) and see how many, if any, ask for LFCS, and you’d get your answer.

Should I focus more on dev ops? Security? Straight SysAdmin?

From what I’ve seen so far, the days of “traditional” Linux sysadmin roles are numbered, if not long gone already - it’s all mostly DevOps-y stuff. Same with traditional security, these days it’s more about DevSecOps.

As a modern Linux sysadmin, the technologies you should be looking at would be Ansible, Kubernetes, Terraform, containers (Docker mainly, but also Podman/LXD), GitOps, CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) concepts and tools.

Some Red Hat shops may also ask for OpenShift, Ansible Tower, Satellite etc experience. IBM shops also use a lot of IBM tools such as IBM Could Paks, Multicloud Management, and AIOps/Watson etc.

And finally there’s all the “cloud” stuff like AWS, Azure, GCP specific things - and they have their own terminologies that you’d need to know and understand (eg “S3”, “Lambda” etc) and they have their own certs to go with it. I suspect a “cloud” cert will net you more jobs than LFCS.

So as you’d probably be thinking by now, all of the above isn’t something you’d know from just using desktop Linux. Of course, desktop Linux experience is certainly useful for understanding some of the core concepts and how it all works under the hood, but unfortunately that experience alone just isn’t going to cut it if you’re out looking for a job.

As I mentioned before, start looking for jobs in your area/relevant to you and look at the technologies they’re asking for, note down the terms which appear most frequently and the certs they’re asking for, and start preparing for them. That is, assuming it’s something you want to work with in the future.

Personally, I’m not a big fan all this new tech (I’m fine with Ansible and containers, but don’t like the industry’s dependency on proprietary techs like Docker Desktop, Amazon or Red Hat’s stuff). I just wanted to work on pure Linux, with all the all standard POSIX/GNU tools and DEs that we’re familiar with, but sadly those sort of jobs don’t really exist anymore.

d3Xt3r, (edited )

Sorry, I guess I meant Docker Desktop, and some of their other proprietary business/enterprise tools (like Docker Scout) that companies have started to use, the stuff that requires a paid subscription. The Docker engine itself remains opensource of course, but a lot of their stuff that’s targeted at enterprises isn’t. These days when companies say “Docker” they don’t mean just the engine, they’re referring to the entire ecosystem.

Also, I have a problem with Docker itself. My main issue is that, on Linux, native container tech like Podman/LXD work, perform and integrate better (at least, from my limited experience), but the industry prefers Docker (no surprises there). As a Linux guy, naturally I want to use the best tool for Linux, not what’s cross-platform (when I don’t care about other platforms). But I can understand why companies would prefer Docker.

d3Xt3r,

Nincompoop! Bashi-bazouk! Visigoth! Anacoluthon!

d3Xt3r,

If you’re talking about the Storage Sense feature - it sucks. It only clears a handful of well-known locations, but it doesn’t touch any of the orphaned content in C:\Windows\Installer, or the CSC or the old Panther folders from upgrades, not to mention several other files and folders in AppData. As I’ve said before, I’ve been a Windows sysadmin (until last year infact) managing over 20,000 devices, we’ve had Storage Sense on, but it’s been mostly useless - to the point that I ended up writing own cleanup script and set it to run before we pushed out a new Windows feature update, because otherwise we’d get several devices which failed to update due to the disk being full.

d3Xt3r,

Interesting, I didn’t know you could create clusters with it! That looks promising then. I was planning to install Proxmox for my homelab but didn’t like that it was a whole distro, which shipped with an ancient kernel…

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