The lightweight Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE), a continuation of the classic KDE 3.5 desktop, designed for users who value traditional layouts without the overhead of modern desktop shells, has announced the release of version 14.1.5, the fifth maintenance update in the R14.1 series.
Among the most notable highlights, TWin, TDE’s window manager, now supports tiling when multiple monitors are in use, bringing better workspace organization for users with complex setups.
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.