With the RAMpocalypse and the Macbook Neo, what do you think the Linux desktop will do for memory efficiency?
Posted by commodore512@reddit | linux | View on Reddit | 111 comments
I heard surprisingly good (for what it is) things about the neo. With it being better than any 8GB of RAM laptop has any business being in current year. I'm sure with Z-RAM, Z-Swap, cgroups and systemd‑oomd can get Linux 80% of the way there and I think an extreme example the large L3 of these x3D processors could get even closer and better in some ways.
What do you think?
TONKAHANAH@reddit
I'd like to think the linux community has always been building for efficiency in the first place, as best they know how anyway.
N00B_N00M@reddit
Linux mint handling 15years old laptop just fine is the testament how efficient linux is
heretogetpwned@reddit
N4200 w/ 4GB soldered on, and OS on eMMC and Cinnamon is still snappy!
Sufficient_Grade4248@reddit
How I have the same setup ish and I can run the os fine but the second I use a browser it swaps like hell and just hangs loads
heretogetpwned@reddit
Firefox with uBlock origin open to reddit.com without sign in:
Memory: 2.1 GB of 3.9 GB Swap: 687.5 MB of 2.1 GB cache: 1.8 GB
CPU1-4: 07-20%, Firefox ~4%
eMMC 60.7GB used 21.5 GB
mSD 125.6 GB used 54.5 GB
N00B_N00M@reddit
Damn, i have a chromebook with exact same configuration, not sure if that can be rooted to install linux, as its performance on chrome is just awful
heretogetpwned@reddit
Acer? I think mine is called Acer Spin 1.
heretogetpwned@reddit
N4200 w/ 4GB soldered on, and OS on eMMC and Cinnamon is still snappy!
TheBazlow@reddit
Depends on the community I think.
XFCE? Yes, absolutely. Gnome? Perhaps less so. GJS was definitely a developer experience over user experience decision.
mattingly890@reddit
Modern KDE Plasma is surprisingly good on memory. Better than XFCE somehow...
TONKAHANAH@reddit
I think a lot of people don't realize this. A nice looking de doesn't have to mean heavy ram usage.
schmeckmaster2000@reddit
Latest Gnome (Fedora 44) runs 100% fine on my 14+ year old 8GB of ram thinkpad. I'm using it right now to type this and it's great.
Ok-Winner-6589@reddit
And XFCE works well on my father's laptop with 4GB of RAM
Not even Windows strugles with 8GB. The issue comes when the desktop uses a lot, you have less for other things. Thats the concern
sam-sung-sv@reddit
Nope, some distros are cooked. There are some very popular distros that won't be able to compete with the version of Mac OS installed on the Macbook Neo.
I did some tinkering with an i9 and used only 8GB of ram. Some distros will hang during installation, and the ones that were successfully installed felt slow, and could not open as many apps as the Macbook Neo. I don't see a reason to use linux instead of just buying a Macbook Neo.
enginmanap@reddit
Down votes are because you are saying something controversial without backing it up. 1) which distributions did you try? Are they big ones like Debian, fedora, arch, or some random things like mySuperOS? 2) What does 'as many apps' mean? Browser with many tabs? Office? Or specialty software? Or are you using Mac apps on Mac, but Windows apps through wine in Linux? 3) what is feeling slow? Are you having apps getting unresponsive for some time, or are they responding slower? If slower, how did you measure? Or is this a feeling?
MacOS comes with both memory compression and a huge swap out of the box. And swaps aggressively. It is perfectly believable that Linux would need tuning for 8gb, not because kernel is lacking, but because bad defaults has been the bane of all distributions for the last 20 years.
sam-sung-sv@reddit
Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora with KDE
Did you see the Macbook Neo demo video? Something similar, and switching between apps was sluggish.
Not a feeling. Tabs crashing, apps unresponsive, mouse was moving extremelly slow. Had to do a hard power off.
58696384896898676493@reddit
You are so full of shit claiming 8GB of RAM is not enough for Ubuntu, Kubuntu, or Fedora.
It's so blatantly bullshit you deserve all the down votes you get.
Blue_fox11@reddit
I used a laptop that had 1.5GB of ram and it ran surprisingly well.
heretogetpwned@reddit
Mint Cinnamon, N4200+4GB and on eMMC storage. It does YouTube, Kodi, browsing, PPSSPP, Steam Remote Play.
Slowest part is the eMMC storage writes, but for basic+ usage this low spec is excellent. (~12W under load)
indvs3@reddit
Nonsense, my parents work on a potato with 4gb ddr2 ram on ubuntu and they have no issues whatsoever, at least besides the obvious "too many open tabs". If you're having performance issues with 8gb of ram, then you're definitely doing something wrong.
Btw, you're not comparing performance between a vm and bare metal, right?
enderfx@reddit
Skill issue.
Not G-Skill issue
ScratchHistorical507@reddit
You're getting downvoted because you're lying. Sure, it can happen that some distro has issues being installed, but I can guarantee you that in not a single case you encountered the fact that you "only" had 8 GB of RAM was the reason.
carlos_pasa_de_ti@reddit
My 4GB Celeron downvoted you.
qwesx@reddit
Bro, I'm running Gentoo on a 10 year old laptop with a full KDE desktop and ZFS on 7.5 GB of usable RAM. And I hardly ever scratch the 5 GB mark on memory used.
sam-sung-sv@reddit
Ok, do the same thing that youtubers did with the Macbook : Open multiple apps at once, including web browser, and Edit a video.
komata_kya@reddit
That's what you do when installing a distro? Editing videos? There is no way an installation will hang because of not enough ram unless you are installing gentoo and emerging llvm without swap.
RythmicCummer@reddit
Wait what, 8gb? What distros are giving you problems? Seems weird to me
TheG0AT0fAllTime@reddit
Lmao.
Coaxalis@reddit
Linux will simply wait the AI bubble to pop and prices drop.
commodore512@reddit (OP)
Why wait for the bubble to pop? I want to use this as an opportunity for software to get better.
One_Maize_4913@reddit
Been running a pretty lean Arch setup on my old thinkpad with 8GB for years and it's wild how much more efficient Linux can be compared to Windows. Z-RAM is legit a game changer - I've got mine set to compress about 40% of my RAM and barely notice any performance hit
The x3D chips are intresting but I think the real magic happens with proper swap management and just not running bloated software. My daily driver handles everything from coding to multiple browser tabs without breaking a sweat, meanwhile my buddy's Macbook starts choking when he opens too many Chrome tabs 💀
The new systemd-oomd stuff has been pretty solid too, way better than the old OOM killer that would just nuke random processes. Linux desktop is already there imo, just need more people to realize how much RAM modern software wastes
Think we're heading toward a future where 8GB might actually be useable again thanks to better memory managment rather than just throwing more hardware at the problem 😂
IdleGandalf@reddit
Just a quick reminder that zswap should be preferred in almost all cases. Maybe you meant that, but just in case you really meant zram I thought I mention that, lots of confusion going around about those two things. Here is a good summary why it should be preferred: https://chrisdown.name/2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-what.html
LordDeath86@reddit
Yeah, that LRU inversion is a problem.
komata_kya@reddit
Desktop linux is already efficient. The only problem is websites and electron apps.
CaptCapy@reddit
Electron sucks so much balls its honestly baffling.
As someone who understands a little bit about hardware and almost nothing of software coding...
Why is chrome using more RAM and cpu thay my entire kernel and operating system. With one tab open.
Why is discord using 2gb to displaying a messaging and image chat.... Insanity.
theTechRun@reddit
That’s why outside of Vivaldi, I don’t use any electron apps
LigPaten@reddit
Browsers are just inherently really complex and a lot of the things they do to make browsing better, like caching fonts and sites, takes a lot of ram. Then there is Javascript which involves more tradeoffs between speed and ram.
Kernels are complex, but they have to be low memory so there's more incentive on their side.
AntLive9218@reddit
No it isn't unfortunately.
Anything based on QT stores text in memory in UTF-16, doubling the space requirement which is rather significant in cases of for example text editors, or file managers.
The related UTF-8 <-> UTF-16 conversions also waste compute power, which may not be easy to notice on a desktop, but would be more obvious on phones.
And that's just the more reasonable direction, I'm not sure GNOME with JavaScript deserves its own distinct category away from Electron.
natermer@reddit
Biggest consumer of RAM for desktops for most people is the browser.
As long as that part is optimized I don't see why you'd have any issues running something like a full Gnome or KDE desktop on 8GB.
In the past couple years there would be occasional rogue desktop processes that would cause problems. Like packagekit/gnome-software or your home directory indexer, like tracker. So to optimize you'd have to go disable those. But I don't think that sort of a thing are that much of a issue anymore.
NotQuiteLoona@reddit
I'm using a machine with i5-4210M and 8 GB RAM (DDR3). On Windows, it wasn't enough for browser and Discord at the same time, not even speaking about background programs. On Linux, I can run IDEA, Discord, Minecraft, Deezer and browser (I don't hoard tabs though, my max is 10 tabs at the same time, and I use Vivaldi) at the same time, all with KDE Plasma (unmodified except for the media player widget), with ZRAM. And zstd compression on btrfs feels just like a magic, it makes space out of nowhere and compresses files more than in a half sometimes.
94358io4897453867345@reddit
The issue is that browsers are far from optimized in their ram usage
duiwksnsb@reddit
Truth. I routinely have to kill Firefox because its ram usage becomes astronomical and will lock my system up hard if I don't kill it in time.
lazer---sharks@reddit
Go to a about:performance and you can see which tab is using it.
I wonder if there is something like OOMkiller but for idle tabs.
There is a website I have to use for volunteering and it starts small but eats ram over time, not great for someone like me that forgets to close tabs
syklemil@reddit
You can run it as a systemd user service (I do), and set
MemoryMax. If you set it correctly firefox will be oomkilled before your system is hosed.LigPaten@reddit
Do you just set it up in your launcher as
systemctl --user start firefox.service?duiwksnsb@reddit
I really need to do that. Sounds super handy
tundramoonlight@reddit
ig your system goes up in flames...
LukePJ25@reddit
I bet that Fire really Fox up their system...
stevecrox0914@reddit
If you avoid Gnome then 4GiB is quite usable.
I used to keep an original Intel Atom Netbook and a Intel Atom Bay Trail Tablet working. They both had 2GiB RAM limits.
The following is based on trying to keep a workable desktop on both through multiple Debian releases...
People complain about KDE dependencies, everything the applications use is broken out into common libraries and linked against. As a result you could open every single KDE application and memory usuage with quickly reach ~1.1GiB but not exceed that without user data, since every KDE library was effectively loaded into memory.
Gnomes dependency tree is far smaller because as most applications bundle in a copy of a library. As you open GTK applications you start loading the same library multiple times and so each new application instance increases RAM usage. There is no limit to memory usuage.
But your correct concerning web browsers, I spent a lot of time tracking my memory usuage with different browsers (Falkon, Firefox, Chrome, Edge, etc..) I found each tab had a memory cost between 400MiB to 1.5Gib.
The browsers seemed to be dokng clever things with tabs not rendering, so my web browsers memory usage was normally 500MiB to 2.5GiB.
So a desktop with the following:
1.1GiB+2.5GiB=3.6GiB
Is still useful
nelmaloc@reddit
I tried stock Ubuntu GNOME on a 4GB VM, and it is usable. It used ~800MB on desktop idle, and 3 tabs on Firefox pushed it over 2GB. You might want to limit how much multitasking you can do, but it works for average workloads.
stevecrox0914@reddit
And??
My point is if you open Gnome it has a base level (e.g. 800MiB), but each application instance constantly adds to RAM usage, so its very easy to reach 1.5GiB to 2GiB from applications in normal use (whenever I have tried it tends to be closer to 1.5GiB).
Then I found my web browser memory usage bounced between 0.5GiB to 2.5GiB.
In theory that largely sits within our 4GiB limit, but in practice you will hit out of memory errors and slow downs frequently enough to be annoying. Largely driven by random websites needing masses of RAM.
KDE's linking approach creates an upper limit of ~1.1GiB so you have just enough headroom that memory isn't an issue.
Mate and XFCE have low enough memory starting positions that they also have headroom to work, but I personally don't enjoy using them as my desktop.
I learnt all this trying tk get something working on 2GiB and while you can.. make them all just about work. It requires active management
tmahmood@reddit
My Surface Pro 3, with 4GB RAM running Gnome disagrees with you. It chugging along for basic usages just fine. And I use it as a thin client for my main desktop for heavy loads. But obviously, you must have swap. Otherwise, even i3 falters.
And right now I have 7-8 active and total 68 tabs open on my Firefox, I am switching between tabs and windows without any lag.
Audible_Whispering@reddit
8GB is still enough for any everyday office laptop, even bloated windows machines. It's just that
There's nothing miraculous about the Macbook Neo, apple just avoided point 2 and made sensible compromises. As a general rule a machine for everday tasks needs half the memory that the internet thinks it needs if its other components are sensibly specced.
Heck, I spent the last 5 years using a 4GB machine. Would I recommend it? No, you do have to make compromises to run 4GB of RAM in the 2020's. Was it unusable? No.
RoomyRoots@reddit
What? Linux is already the best on that since you can set everything as you wish. Real problem is shit like browsers, office and other unoptimized hogs.
VIXtrade@reddit
Lots of interest in Linux for the new NEO but don't think there's Linux for it yet.
Asahi from M3 and up is still a 'work in progress' and the A18 Pro support is likely to take years to develop.
Sounds like progress has slowed since founder Hector Martin has left.
martyn_hare@reddit
ZSwap with vm.swappiness cranked up with the rest backed by a very fast NVMe SSD does the job just fine on that front. Apple threw a super fast SSD into their devices so that a lack of RAM isn't an issue as long as multiple applications aren't constantly fighting for physical memory residency.
KnowZeroX@reddit
Isn't the Neo ssd fairly slow?
https://birchtree.me/content/images/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-26-at-09.43.04@2x.png
m103@reddit
Those speeds are for sustained reads and writes, with swap (and really, must forms of file usage) you want to compare the random read and write speeds. Those will likely be much more similar as that is an area that hasn't had much improvement in over the years because it would take an entirely different way of making the chips to get significantly faster random speeds.
KnowZeroX@reddit
Found some numbers for random reads and writes, pretty poor as well.
https://assets-prd.ignimgs.com/2026/03/19/amorphousdiskmark-tests-1773882236815.jpg
As for how fast nvmes can get in random read and write
https://laptopmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/990pro.jpg
About 2-4x faster read and 10-20x faster write
TheG0AT0fAllTime@reddit
All SSDs are bad for swap because swapping in the first place should be a last resort thing. Performance tanks if you're on a machine that has little memory and must swap to be usable
The_frozen_one@reddit
Slow relative to much faster SSDs, but think about it like this: it would take less than 8 seconds to replace every byte in memory. You can make it crawl, but most people aren’t jumping between over-committed VMs on a device like that.
Lower-Limit3695@reddit
Add in prelockd to make sure everything needed to keep a desktop interactive never gets swapped and you're practically golden.
Cold_Soft_4823@reddit
people should make a habit out of closing their browser when they aren't using it, or realize that the modern desktop pc is 90% browser activity
Existing-Tough-6517@reddit
L3 cache isn't a replacement for RAM. Is there some reason to use oomd instead of earlyoom?
8gb soldered on a device that could last 10 years is still broken out of the gate
Dom1252@reddit
nothing at all
JohnyJohn92@reddit
Linux desktop is already super efficient , just playing FF16 with mods ram usage 12.7 with Firefox tabs open, on plasma 6.6 and steam etc, while windows is 20.x + gb the same. If you want even more drop plasma for xfce or tiling manager and enjoy
Cats7204@reddit
RAM prices will decrease sooner or later, after the AI craze winds down and the most inefficient and unprofitable models and businesses go down. They won't reach pre-AI levels of course.
I believe that we'll start seeing more and more SSD integrated caches as a middle ground between RAM speeds and SSD speeds. High-end drives already have it, but I believe it'll become ubiquitous, just like most stuff reserved for high-end PCs only, and the future high-end workstations will either just have more cache than the average, or discrete cache like Intel Optane.
Linux already has the infrastructure built in the kernel to work well with this type of system, and Microsoft can adapt just fine if they just stop being stupid with their slop.
ahfoo@reddit
Why would you say ¨won´t reach pre-AI levels¨?
Despite the naming conventions at fabs, the reality is that most features are closer to 30nm and there is still room to scale transistor count. It is almost certain that weĺl see a future where 128Gigs of DRAM is standard and it will quite likely be cheaper than it ever was.
It was never the case that DRAM development ceased because of AI, what happened was that China now has a huge opportunity to move into the DRAM market. CMXT was not even a player in DRAM just a few years ago. As of this year, they´re supplying more than ten percent of the global market.
People are overly focused on the high end where Samsung, SK-Hynix and Micron have dedicated all their resources but are ignoring the fact that China has rushed in to fill the gap that they left in consumer DRAM. There is still plenty of DRAM being made but itś coming from new players because the big boys all went off chasing waterfalls. When that goes badly and they come limping back, it will be too late and thatś when the prices will go through the floor.
Cats7204@reddit
I thought it wouldn't reach pre-AI levels because it was already at a historic low and AI isn't really going anywhere, only the bad and unprofitable ones are gonna crash and burn but ones like Gemini or Claude probably won't go away. So demand will permanently increase.
I didnt count on Chinese fabs though, I hope they can make good performance chips.
miicah@reddit
And the big DRAM manufacturers have all stated they don't want to make new fabs right? So as the demand starts to wind down and more Chinese fabs come online, you're going to have production capacity going up at the same time.
imacmadman22@reddit
Memory management in macOS is highly optimized; it uses several different methods to manage available systems memory. The OS manages memory in such a way that system memory can be freed up from applications that are inactive or not currently performing a necessary task and then make that memory available to a higher priority task.
By re-prioritizing active and inactive tasks, system memory can be made available for higher priority tasks. Memory management on macOS is designed to use virtual memory, like other modern operating systems, but the difference is that unlike most UNIX-based operating systems, it does not use a preallocated disk partition for the backing store. Instead, it uses all of the available space on the machine’s boot partition as memory.
Far_Calligrapher1334@reddit
I've yet to see a distro that doesn't run perfectly fine on 8GB. I've only upgraded my RAM a couple months ago, and the only times I have ever ran into any kind of problem was when I tried compiling something huge (Firefox, etc) or ran a game that made Wine freak out. Of course, I don't do video editing or LLM work, but for office work + gaming + web browsing + media + music production it was absolutely fine.
Analog_Account@reddit
This isnt really Apple doing anything different with the neo. MacOS has been better with small amounts of RAM for a long time. I still have an M1 Air 8gb and its still solid.
graywolf0026@reddit
Recycle old hardware that's still perfectly viable and shouldn't be e-wasted just because Apple and Microsoft 'say so'?
.... I've always hated forced/planned obsolescence. My ThinkPad T60 can run Debian x86 (for how much longer, who knows but it can), and frankly I'm okay with that. Even if it is a Windows XP Era laptop.
crypticcamelion@reddit
I'm happily running whatever I like on my 8GB old old Lenovo Legion with linux and KDE. I have had to make a large swap file only because of Blender 3D othervise I never even get close to using 8GB
erwan@reddit
The Linux desktop is modular, so it's up to you to pick the bricks that put the focus on memory efficiency (or use a distro that makes that choice for you)
paskapersepaviaani@reddit
Well I'm currently sitting on a Lenovo laptop which has 8 Gb of ram and with a custom Arch Linux setup on it.
I have used that as my main work machine since January 2025.
I do layouts, graphics design, video editing, 3d visualisation, etc.
Works really well.
Mereo110@reddit
What about your browser usage? Does it consume a lot of ram?
paskapersepaviaani@reddit
Depends on the sites I open. Sometimes if I open multiple resource heavy webpages I notice a hiccup. But such services are rare and often an indication of bad design/development.
I usually have several tabs open anyway.
twistedfires@reddit
Are you worried about ram usage? Slap dwm on that bad boy and let the browser use the rest in one tab.
The problem always has been the applications people use.
Flat_Grower@reddit
/Facepalm
First of all the prices are already falling because openai said "fuck it, we're not actually going to buy 40% of worlds ram supply, get fucked everyone, suppliers can suck our letters of intent".
Secondly, how do you plan to install Linux on an iPhone 16?
Zatujit@reddit
Fixing Electron in the first place lol
Zatujit@reddit
Also with Googles new algorithm for ML it should somewhat decrease
Suvvri@reddit
Linus' gonna ship a stick of ram with every Linux kernel downloaded
Willing-Actuator-509@reddit
I'm running production servers with 6GB of RAM. What are you talking about?
MonsieurCellophane@reddit
When I was a lad your age, our servers had no memory, just a guy with a legal yellow pad down the hall and when they gave us punched tape, we had to punch it by hand. But did we complain? Nossir, we were happy.
MonsieurCellophane@reddit
When I was a lad your age, our servers had no memory, just a guy with a legal yellow pad down the hall and when they gave us punched tape, we had to punch it by hand. But did we complain? Nossir, we were happy.
speedyundeadhittite@reddit
I remember the days we used to run servers with 4MB of RAM and that was huge. Damn I hate this timeline.
cigh@reddit
My system idles at around 600mb of RAM with a tiling wm.
Browser and electron apps are the real killer.
FunAware5871@reddit
The issue isn't Linux, but the incredibly huge amount of electron slop and web 2.0 pushing for each tab to be a poorly optimized js application.
omniuni@reddit
It's not Linux that's the problem, it's the apps today are written.
I had a laptop I really liked for many years and finally replaced it because 8GB of RAM just wasn't doing it anymore. The problem was mostly browsers, Electron apps, and modern development toolchains.
Primary_Bad_3778@reddit
I'm on DDR3 and haven't noticed any *pocalypse in any way, used junk goes for same prices as a-before. reason I haven't upgraded from 16 to 32 GB is I'm cheap and don't think I need it.
RealSharpNinja@reddit
Reducing cache thresholds will do more for memory usage than anything else.
speedyundeadhittite@reddit
The kernel will give up cache as quickly as possible already.
RealSharpNinja@reddit
Giving it up and never allocating are different things. Also, if the kernel has to decide what cache to drop in lieu of application ram, that's time wasted.
AvonMustang@reddit
It's really hard to beat MacOS for efficiency since Apple only has to worry about working on a very limited set of hardware...
ScratchHistorical507@reddit
Not really though. Sure, you won't find a distro that works on everything and still can keep a low profile, but there are distros like anitX that are made to run on old and very limited hardware. So I'm fact, Linux itself can be at least as efficient as macOS, if not more. it can run on basically anything if you want it to.
JoeB-@reddit
Not only a limit set of hardware - Apple also has complete control over the hardware/software stack.
TerribleReason4195@reddit
That is true. I always thought macOS was the easiest OS to build in real time because it only has to work with apple's hardware, and partially because they took code from BSD and used old code from NeXT.
ScratchHistorical507@reddit
Ubuntu just raised their "minimum requirement" to 6 GB of RAM, though that's more of a recommendation than a real requirement. You'd already be fine with 4 GB as long as you don't run any fat Electron apps and the like. And if you have even less RAM, there are DEs like Xfce, LXQt or LXDE or WMs like i3/Sway, Niri or Hyprland that will use even less. You don't even need any swapping or RAM compression. So Linux isn't just there 80 % of the way, it's more like 200+ % there.
ThatOnePerson@reddit
Not just ram but with SSDs going crazy, tiering filesystem for combining multiple types of drives with smarter movement inbetween them! And compression.
silentjet@reddit
Most of the Linux IDE works fine on 2G of RAM, that's why we are using them on Arm SBCs (like PIs, Bones and other)
xepk9wycwz9gu4vl4kj2@reddit
Most systems are quite efficient in this regard it’s more about applications and in windows case the two quadrillion surveillance services that eat memory
petrujenac@reddit
Rather ask your browser instead. Linux desktop is doing more than fine.
BlazingSpaceGhost@reddit
I've been running minimal window managers without a full desktop environment for over 15 years at this point. Hyperland is a little heavier than dwm, openbox, or awesomewm but it still blows kde and gnome out of the water.
sleepingonmoon@reddit
Not much it can do. Mechanisms like app nap require integration far beyond what's feasible for Linux desktops in their current state. Only Microsoft can possibly compete but they're too busying pushing AI right now.
commodore512@reddit (OP)
Most of App Nap could just be a frontend for cgroups V2
LvS@reddit
I think that people will start working on it if it ends up being an actual problem.
I don't thing 8GB is an actual problem, Linux desktops run fine on old phones and laptops from 2010.
Once we try to make it work with 1GB it might get interesting again.
Xu_Lin@reddit
Uh… swap?
Psionikus@reddit
https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/Ariadne a slight twist on Zswap, sending the compressed pages to disk and some better hot-cold strategies.
The other idea that probably has a lot of legs is compression with pre-optimized dictionaries and some heuristics to know which cold pages will nearly evaporate under the right dictionary.
lazer---sharks@reddit
Zswap is good, zram is stupid, it's marginally benefitial at best but OSX kills that benefit the way that it schedules things anyway.
There isn't much to be done it's the apps that use the ram and hacks like zram come at the expense or having to decompress it to use it.
Someone got mad at me for using the term ricer the other day because of its racist origins, but ram hacks are asthetic, they might improve a benchmark or 2 but real world benefits are largely perceived rather than real.