kokopelli wrote:
My workstation is having more and more issues with freezing up due to running out of memory. It seems worse on OpenSuSE than on other distributions.
Later and later versions of Linux seem to be making heavier and heavier demands on memory resources.
There are some versions of Linux that need very little memory. I'm tempted to try one of them.
Here's an article on the 12 best Lightweight Linux Distributions in 2024:
https://linuxsimply.com/best-lightweight-linux-distros/Thee are the distributions from the article:
1) Puppy Linux
2) Lubuntu
3) Absolute LInux
4) Bodhi Linux
5) Linux Lite
6) antiX
7( Zorin OS Lite
8 ) Ubuntu Mate
9) Peppermint OS
10) BunsenLabs
11) DSL (Damn Small Linux)
12) Tiny Core Linux
I wouldn't be opposed to switching to FreeBSD if I can run LibreWolf, Signal desktop, Telegram desktop, and ProtonVPN on it without too much effort.
I may be a bit late to the party here, but, you might check out void linux. I've been using it for a while now. It is said to be more BSD-like, but I am not familiar enough with the BSD's to be able to compare them. I think one of the original devs used to work on netBSD. Anyway, I like it's package manager, and it has been stable for me for a number of years now.
If you start to tinker, you should be able to get the memory usage of most any distro down to something very manageable. Init systems, and active daemons and processes can make some difference (although not really a huge difference). Biggest thing, I think, has to do with the desktop environment and all of it's features. My current system uses about 200 mb ram just to idle on the "desktop". Using i3 window manager and currently don't have any compositing going on (compositors can eat ram fast, but at the moment I don't have one installed and running because this is a today fresh install on a new-to-me machine). There is a window manager called "dwm" (dynamic window manager) that gets resource usage down even further, and I think the Sway window manager, which as far as I know is a wayland fork of i3wm brings in a compositor and lowers ram usage at the same time (from some very brief tests I did a few years ago).