Fedora 15 + Google Chrome Testing my Patience...

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So this might be more a ehrome problem but I am really starting to get annoyed with the amount of swapping/overall memory usage I am seeing on my laptop. Between gnome-shell and google chrome I seem to be in a perpetual state of disk trashing on my laptop. I have 2GB of memory which should be more than enough for what I use my laptop for.... browsing the internet and programming. What I am seeing though is that gnome-shell and google chrome are just massive memory hogs for no apparent reason.

Can anyone recommend another distro which is lower memory usage and maybe not using gnome 3.0 (or gnome at all). I have been using Fedora for an extremely long time but I am just finding myself completely fed up with it now. Basically I don't do anything fancy on my laptop.... internet and programming that's it. I mainly just use the terminal. A few things I like about Fedora that another distro needs to do:

1) Support LLVM and have install options which will preserve specific LLVM paritions... I keep my home directory on a separate LLVM partition so when I re-install I can just tell it to install onto my root partition and not touch my personal files
2) Seperate free/non-free repositories... This is something I really like about Fedora, there is no flash player or binary driver support in the main repository, the only non-free software I use is flash player and I prefer to install that by hand anyway (This kind of rules out ubuntu I think)
3) Preferably python 2.7+ support

My laptop was pretty much picked for linux support so drivers wont be an issue... it doesn't require any non-free driver support to run. I am not afraid of terminals or anything (more afraid of GUIS!) but I just don't really know which distro is good for what anymore... the only ones I have experience with are Fedora and Debian. It sounds like some of you 'distro-hop' a bit more and might know more about the differences between them. So I ask you, what distro could I replace Fedora with? Minimalism would be a plus!

It's probably Chrome. Chrome has horrendous memory leaks. That said, GNOME3 is not exactly resource-friendly either, and Fedora is often rather buggy.

Debian sounds like exactly what you're looking for- lightweight, no GNOME 3 in the stable version, separate free/nonfree repos and very strict about what gets into the free repo (stricter than Fedora, in fact), LLVM support, python3 available.

Have you tried chromium instead of Google-chrome?

I'll try just using Firefox for a while before I switch distros, though Gnome 3 is driving my nuts still. Could it really be that chrome leaks memory so bad I need to restart the browser several times a day?



I thought chromium and chrome were essentially the same thing? Is chromium supposedly better than google chrome?

Well chromium is better just for the fact that is doesn't include googles tracking guff (and its foss). I was just thinking that the build of Chrome you are using is probably broken. So I suggested you install chromium.


Did it help BTW?

I'm going to try using Firefox today to see if I have as many swap issues. I will probably test out chromium tomorrow. I guess since chromium tracks right off of the source code it might included more bug fixes than Google Chrome would, which has a longer trip from source tree to binary executable i would suspect. I did not know there was tracking in Chrome... I guess that is what I get for not paying attention to software for so long.

Well its not tracking like doubleclick do. It's more like to enhance search results or display relevant ads. But its still sneaky imho.

Good luck BTW.

Ps

Have you tried midori? Runs on webkit and supports extensions and userscripts.

I haven't tried midori, the only other browser I have used extensively was Epiphany (the Gnome browser), which I used up until they started switching from the Gecko engine to WebKit. The thing I don't like about Firefox is just how many bells and whistles it has... way too many options and features... I just want a simple browser. Chrome also seemed to have the best developer tools, plus I have been using the V8 engine standalone for some javascript code. Does Midori have any sort of extension for StumbleUpon... that is pretty much the only extension I use. The chrome StumbleUpon extension seems to basically just add HTML to every page so it seems like it might be simple enough to work in Midori.

Yes. I have used Chromium (which is basically the same thing) and after a bit of uptime, especially with multiple tabs, it can bring my computer to a grinding halt. I've got a quad-core processor and 4 gigs of memory. That is not enough resources to handle Chrome/Chromium with extended uptime.

Totally with you on FireFox. I switched from mozilla suite to FireFox around about ff1.5 and I did so because it was so light and fast. Ironically mozilla suite (seamonkey) is now far lighter.

Hope all goes well with midori. Some builds, especially repo versions can be buggy.

Yup, I started using Firefox around 0.7, back when internet sites were still made for Internet Explorer. And yes... it was lightweight back then and that was what made it so awesome. I don't understand why so many software packages keep on feeling like they need to add features. I can see wanting to rework parts of the backend and such, but sometimes I feel like new features are just made up so new version numbers can be used. A new version of a software generally seems to mean fixing half the bugs and introducing twice as many new ones.

Well that's progress for you lol.

I must admit though... one feature that is far superior in firefox compared to chrome is the full screen mode. You cannot switch tabs in full screen mode in chrome.

Didn't notice that Chrome didn't allow you to switch tabs in fullscreen. That's a bit crap. Though I suppose for kiosk browsing purposes that could be ok. I do like firefox full screen though. It works nice in a vm window when I'm having to use windows. I'll only browse on Linux lol.

Why not just get rid of GNOME3 in favour of Xfce or LXDE or even GNOME 2.32??
(Hell, why not try GNOME3 in Failsafe, it will probably run better)

If you do want to change distros, you being from an RPM background I would say go with OpenSUSE.
zypper is very good these days, they have the best KDE implementation, it will usually be more stable than "bleeding edge" Fedora, the OpenSUSE Build Service is great, too...
And YaST = awesomeness if you don't want to fiddle.
Various LiveCDs are out there take your pick.

If you don't mind going over to the dark side (deb), your best bet would probably be Mint or Debian itself.
Or if you want an adventure, get Arch - it's about as minimalist as it can get.

You probably won't see a big difference in performance whichever distro you go to if do change (mind you Fedora has a reputation for being buggy, so who knows) if you intend to use GNOME3 or KDE... Just keep that in mind, and use a lightweight Desktop whichever distro you go to and you should be fine...