this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
52 points (100.0% liked)
Linux
67448 readers
186 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What "background services" breaks down to is things like the desktop. In the system monitor you can see a breakdown of what that is if you click on "show details sidebar" in top right. On my system for instance, plasmashell and kwin combined(the interface) is taking 700mb. Without the info from the sidebar it is harder to give advice.
Baloo is used for searching you system for files including contents. You can disable it if it isn't something you'd use, limit it to certain directories or limit it to file names only. It will be under search in settings.
Edit: Also check how much swap you have enabled in the system monitor overview. You might look into turning on zram support if it isn't already enabled which will compress ram as needed which might improve your experience.
If they have swap then zswap is better than zram because it works better with the Linux memory management.
Don't know when it's ready, but they're working on a way for zswap to work without a swap disk set up. When that is done there shouldn't be any reason left to use zram at all. At least not as a swap disk.
it says that i have 0B of swap
If you have 0B's total enabled, not to be confused with used, then I'd recommend either enabling zswap or zram. zram compresses only ram and zswap compresses ram and then moves it to the drive as needed. Enabling one will improve your experience in general as currently your system just will try to shove everything in ram until it is full and need hard reset.
See [https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Swap#Swap_file](Arch Wiki Swap) and [https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Zswap](Arch Wiki zSwap)
link formats in markdown put the link in the parenthesis and the name in the square brackets not the other way around.
if your unsure about how the text will look before you post there is usualy a preview button on the bottom that your can use
My old 8GB laptop runs amazingly well with an 8GB swap file and Zswap enabled. If you set up both with 16GB of RAM, your machine should be able to handle most anything easily.
some distros don't come with a swap file by default, you can manually add one though