Comment by still_grokking | Hacker News Reader

Comment by still_grokking | Hacker News Reader

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I see no issue with Linux memory management. I'm currently using an older Dell laptop (I guess 2 to 3 years old. Inspiron, or something like that. It's very shitty. Got it for free. Would not buy anything form Dell. The hardware falls apart after so short time! It's a wonder it still works).

But: I have currently on this Debian Testing box under KDE Unity, Rider, Sublime Merge (with a few hundred changed files), half a dozen Yakuake tabs, Kate as note pad, and around 30 Firefox windows (with maybe 5 to 6 thousand tabs)¹ open.

According to htop it uses only around 15 GB RAM.

(Hmm, actually something seems not OK when I look at it as there is still unused RAM, but htop says almost 9 days of uptime? And it still didn't fill all unused RAM with FS cache? Strange. Did something change in Linux 6.0? Maybe something really broke in Linux memory management? But I actually didn't notice anything unusual after the latest Kernel update.)

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¹ Before someone asks: Yes, thousands of tabs. But don't ask further…

Firefox handles this just fine with the help of tree tabs and tab auto discard. Only "booting" Firefox in such a state takes some time (I guess over 1 min.); but when it runs it runs just fine. No issues.

You truly live on the edge, my friend.

As a side note, what I truly like about random comments like this is the app naming. Never ever had heard of Yakuake, but that looks seriously interesting (Tough luck I'm on MacOS now).

Fetching Kate as we speak.

> You truly live on the edge, my friend.

I have an issue sorting tabs. I don't want to throw away research, and than never find some interesting things again. Actually having so much windows is already a good sign as it means I've sorted parts of the mess. But would still need to bookmark (and tag) stuff and this could take some time.

So I just "never" close tabs… (I close them after reading, and bookmarking and tagging the more interesting things; but I open new tabs faster than I could sort old ones… That's the problem.)

I think I had once even over 10k tabs open. But back than FF was much more unstable and it crashed in the end.

> Never ever had heard of Yakuake […]

It's one of the oldest KDE apps. I thing I was already there in version KDE 1. It's an drop-down console wrapper around `konsole-part`, the std. console "widget" in KDE. So it can do everything that Konsole (the default terminal in KDE) can do. But the window management is simpler with the drop-down approach.

Kate is the "dumb" desktop editor in KDE (besides KWrite, which I think nobody uses). But for a "dumb" editor it's quite powerful by now. And it's fast!

I don't do anything funky with it though. You can build half an IDE with it I think. But I never tried to get some LSP servers working with it. It's just my default "dumb" text editor.

I didn't know that there's a version for other OSes! Does it really work under macOS (or Windows)? I'm baffled to be honest. Also the webpage looks like Kate has much more features than I've seen. Even I use it for years. Interesting.

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