A decade ago, that was a lot of RAM for a desktop environment. In the late '00s, I remember Ubuntu with Gnome 2 using around ~128 MB of RAM right after boot.
What happened? Most DEs aren't that much more complicated than they were a decade+ ago. Is it the array of supporting libraries (Qt and Gtk) that get loaded into memory? I could see that being a problem since even the "lightweight" DEs like XFCE and LXQt rely on them heavily.
A decade ago, that was a lot of RAM for a desktop environment. In the late '00s, I remember Ubuntu with Gnome 2 using around ~128 MB of RAM right after boot.
What happened? Most DEs aren't that much more complicated than they were a decade+ ago. Is it the array of supporting libraries (Qt and Gtk) that get loaded into memory? I could see that being a problem since even the "lightweight" DEs like XFCE and LXQt rely on them heavily.