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Mashimotoday at 1:56 PM2 repliesview on HN

Is this advice also applicable to Desktops installations?


Replies

therealmarvtoday at 4:27 PM

The better distros have it (ZRAM) enabled by default for desktops (I think PopOS and Fedora). In my personal experience every desktop Linux should use memory compression (except you have an absurd amount of RAM) because it helps so much, especially with everything related to browser and/or electron usage!

Windows and macOS have it enabled by default for many years (even if it works a little different there).

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stdbrouwtoday at 6:47 PM

I get the impression that most desktop users enable zram or zswap to get a little bit more out of their RAM but there is never any real worry about OOM, not regularly anyway, so then (according to the principles laid out in the article) it shouldn't matter much.

On my workstation, I run statistical simulations in R which can be wasteful with memory and cause a lot of transient memory pressure, and for that scenario I do like that zswap works alongside regular swap. Especially when combined with the advice from https://makedebianfunagainandlearnhowtodoothercoolstufftoo.c... to wake up kswapd early, it really does seem to make a difference.