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Comment by marmarama | Hacker News Reader

My Ubuntu KDE installation uses ~700MB RAM at idle with a fresh login and I've been using it with Wayland for years now without the problems the author describes.

My Steam Deck KDE uses ~1.3GB, more than half of which is taken by the baloo_file_extractor process.

Apparently doing background indexing of file contents gobbles RAM. Not sure if that's the problem with the author's setup?

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He's included screenshots of top. It appears he has akonadi installed which from my experience is a huge memory consumer. It's the first thing I uninstall on new builds.

Ah, I missed the zip file with the screenshots in. Yes, Akonadi loves RAM. I'm a bit confused as to why it's installed and running by default in this case - is this a Fedora-ism? I don't think Kubuntu or Arch install it by default, it's only installed as a dependency if you install elements of the KDEPIM suite.

FWIW, after baloo_file_extractor finished indexing new files on my Steam Deck, it exited, and KDE RAM usage was down to ~600MB.

Yeah, it's a bit old fashioned IMO. It comes with CD/DVD ripping software and an Office suite for example. It seems to be aimed towards Office users rather then home users. I always uninstall most of the default software.

> Yeah, it's a bit old fashioned

That sums up Fedora and Red Hat's other stuff pretty well.

my KDE/Plasma on EndeavourOS sits at about 1GB after boot. (4k display scaled up to 1440p)

yes i also disabled baloo file indexing as it was randomly chewing cpu and ram. no real need for it with a fast NVME and ripgrep, etc.

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