What on earth requires to eat 1.5 gig of RAM?
I'm writing this under KDE 22.08 and plasmashell took 700m RES.
KWin 180m RES. Why we were able to server the same windows in 90 with 64m RAM total, now window manager requires 180m. No composition is running.
Functionality basically the same, no user experience breakthrough. And yet.
Modern WMs and desktop shells use way more memory because they cache more bitmaps (we now render text as bitmaps and composite them, and the drawing styles/themes are now much more than flat gray fill with the odd non-antialiased line), and because the bitmaps are far larger due to much higher resolutions and bit depths.
A single uncompressed 1080p 32-bit (24-bit with 8-bit alpha) wallpaper is 66MB of RAM. A similar single 4k wallpaper takes 265MB RAM. All those fancy-looking high-res 32-bit icons also take huge amounts of RAM.
I'm an idiot, you're right. There, it's on record. I claim under-caffeination. Still, the basic point still stands, even if my numbers need to be divided by 8. Desktops use more memory because, as users, we demand fancy true-color graphics, high resolutions, and anti-aliasing that we didn't have in the Windows 9x era.
