And I don’t mean just Google’s Android. Every single iteration. With their stupid memory management for PoWeR sAvInG.
I was typing up a rant on how incredibly boring and stupid Disclosure Day was when I just quickly switched to Firefox to look up a character’s name when Android decided that I was done using my Lemmy client and just outright killed it without even giving it enough time to save my comment to drafts, like it usually does.
You can never be sure when you leave an app whether it will continue doing what it’s supposed to or if it will be frozen or killed.
I’ve got 4 GB of RAM and multiple CPU cores. That should be enough to run a dozen apps in parallel. My frickin N900 with 128 MB had better multitasking than a modern Android smartphone!
I’ve got 4 GB of RAM and multiple CPU cores. That should be enough to run a dozen apps in parallel.
In which world is 4GB enough to multitask a web browser under any OS?
I’ve got 4 GB of RAM
Sadly that’s an almost unusable amount these days. The OS will use half of that just sitting idle, and Google Play Services will use a fifth of the remainder (you can enable Developer Mode and view running services to see this yourself). 4 gigs is solidly in the “only one or two apps open at a time” range.
(It doesn’t help that every Android app includes its own separate copies of all its libraries and dependencies for compatibility reasons. There’s no such thing as a lightweight app without going out of your way to avoid the normal development ecosystem)
Android also doesn’t use swap (storing unused/rarely accessed memory contents on the disk for later), instead shifting stale memory pages to a compressed block in RAM (zram), so once it starts filling up with cached background apps it has to start killing apps or the system will hang. The less RAM you have, the sooner this will happen, and both Lemmy clients and web browsers use a ton of RAM.
I feel like this might be the wrong community for this
Although I am mildly infuriated that you hate Android
A bunch of the “fediverse” reacts poorly to this. But, speaking as someone who never even considered Apple, using Android doesn’t have to mean it’s smart to go into intentional denial of a long list of shit that sucks, just to be a fanboy.
using Android doesn’t have to mean it’s smart to go into intentional denial of a long list of shit that sucks, just to be a fanboy.
No OS can do magic and turn 4GB RAM into a suitable amount for memory hungry modern web browsers.
I disable power management on the apps I use often and never run into the issue. Perhaps that might help create a less frustrating experience for you.
I disable power management on the apps I use often and never run into the issue.
Power management does nothing when RAM is as constrained as 4GB
can confirm. my last phone had only 4gb of RAM and was like this regardless of any settings i changed and it was INFURIATING
If ever there was an excuse to switch to a E/os or another legacy android custom ROM like Lineage OS.
Because with only 4GB of RAM you’re not going to get the performance you want because the operating system for newer phones takes up so much of that RAM usage.
What you’re doing right now seems like you’re attempting to push your hardware beyond it’s limitations to run software that your phone isn’t specced for.
Google generally gets around this by providing a lighter weight version of their OS for bottom tier specced phones with Android GO, and budget phones were a lot of the reason they tried this.
It’s either that or, you have settings configured in such a way that when you close certain apps they aren’t persistent in memory (which makes sense with a budget phone or a low specced phone) and honestly that could also be Google’s fault because of default settings and their propensity for memory leaks.
I would argue that it’s not every iteration of android, but I get your point. I don’t think you were looking for solutions, but just in case, my comment is here.
4GB ram is enough for a glorified Lemmy/PornHub device. I use a Redmi 4x with 4GB and a snapdragon 435. It’s fast enough for modern mobile games (well barely). The only problem is the modern internet with too-much scripts to actually be performant on low-end devices.
Android is mostly problematic if it’s a stock operating system, filled with corporate spyware, which makes the device run terribly.
My Redmi was practically useless before installing Lineage OS. Now it’s good enough for most things I do.
4GB ram is enough for a glorified Lemmy/PornHub device. I use a Redmi 4x with 4GB and a snapdragon 435. It’s fast enough for modern mobile games (well barely).
Not anymore. Phones running Android 15 can get a full version of android rather than the Go variant but Android 16 and above require 6 GB of RAM or you’ll have to use the Go variant.
At the end of the day the entire OS has gotten bloated with features and apps have gotten larger and more resource hungry.
On my device I have 5.2GB of RAM currently allocated to “System”, and 2.9GB allocated to apps.
Your phone. Not my phone, so it doesn’t seem like an android problem.
Or possibly the apps you are using? I don’t think I have ever had this problem.
But that said: I would love to replace it all with a true Linux phone.
But that said: I would love to replace it all with a true Linux phone.
4GB RAM, a modern web browser, and no swap file/partition. That doesn’t work well anywhere. Not Android, not GNU/Linux, not Windows, not macOS.
Bullshit
I felt like I should add something to defense side, so I did a quick install of Linux Mint limited to 4GB of RAM, with no swap.
I didn’t know what to run, so here’s LibreOffice Impress, SuperTuxKart, and Firefox with this Lemmy post open, streaming internet radio, playing 1080p YouTube video, and an additional tab with forum post about forcing software rendering as SuperTuxKart was horribly broken inside the VM.Fits into the 4GB.
Additionally, just for fun, you can see the RAM usage on my host, also nearing full usage. You may also see a pretty solid benchmark of the VM disk in the screenshot. This is because I installed the VM into tmpfs on the host.
Seems pretty damn usable, even for some multi-tasking.
People really underestimate how little RAM Linux actually uses. You could run it on pretty much anything. I think it uses about 50% less than Windows 11?