I have macbook air with M1 chip, I wish I could change to linux but unfortunately I cant so I try to stick as much as possible to using open source on macos. But i cant understand why FOSS apps take up so much space in memory. I’m even getting messages that says that I dont have space left in memory and i must close apps, and I thought that chip M1 was enough with 8gb of ram. I send a pic of my memory usage.
This isn’t exactly true. My guess is your app profiles are either bloated, and/or your measuring your RAM usage incorrectly/unfairly.
On my M1 MBA for instance, a fresh profile of LibreWolf (+ child processes) uses 514 MB. Compare this with a closed-source browser like Opera (fresh profile) which takes up a massive 1183 MB. Vivaldi uses a but lesser RAM compared to LW, but it’s still a comparable amount (486 MB), whereas the new and fancy Arc browser uses 587.3 MB.
Now, LibreOffice on the other hand does take up more RAM than MS Office by default - 475.4 MB - but it works a bit differently to MSO, because LO uses a single binary for all office applications, unlike MSO where each office application is it’s own app. But if I were to open a blank Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, and a blank LO Writer, Calc, Impress documents, they use approximately the same amount of RAM in total (~750 MB).