I just discovered that gnome-shell is hogging 4GB of my librem-11 (out of only 8GB). Is there a lighter weight desktop I can (easily? haha) switch to?
I’ve never been a fan of the gnome desktop, preferring, general, CLI when possible, and a dropdown menu for application launching.
It seems gnome-shell is required for the default setup. Killing it does not help 
I remember (when mine worked) it had a memory footproint of ~1.7-2.5 GB but I don’t recall. Still awaiting the parts to repair it.
I don’t have a Librem 11 and don’t know if this works, but on my Librem 14 the experience has been extremely nice and smooth after installing MATE desktop using apt and getting it from the base PureOS software repos without installing anything else special. My understanding is that MATE forked from Gnome2 instead of Gnome3, so it might be slightly less mobile friendly. But also, if we assume that GNOME is one of the projects always suffering from more and more negative influence of either
(1) less experienced users asking for bad features inspired by proprietary tech they’re trying to escape, or else
(2) government or corporate negative influence trying to worsen GNOME
… then it stands to reason that because GNOME would be always getting worse, GNOME2 would be better than GNOME3. I haven’t personally tried GNOME1 but perhaps it is better than GNOME2.
And thus, since MATE is forked from GNOME2, perhaps it is better.
Thank you Dlonk, you are incredible!
Edit:
Gnome is Google and Apple. IMHO. I am super sad because Gnome is managing Phosh, which there are enormous possibilities gnome disgrace Phosh. Or maybe already did 
Maybe break something so that the GUI never starts at all. Then you should be presented with a classic login window. Just enter your username and password, and away you go. Even if you don’t take this suggestion up, it may make sense to use it to measure RAM usage in a pure CLI environment.
Seems a bit off. On my desktop I can see that gnome-shell is using 200 MB.
Leaking?
Poorly configured?
There may be some merit in doing a cold boot and seeing whether gnome-shell starts at some more reasonable figure.
Thanks @irvinewade I am familiar with a console login vs gui. I was hoping there might be a non-gnome desktop option “supported” by the PureOS distro. I’ll dig around the debian world to see what I can find. I’ve used other distros that had a “desktop switcher”.
As for memory use, what I quoted was after a (necessary, grrr) hard power cycle. 4GB is the Virtual footprint, not physical, but that’s still pretty outrageous in my opinion. I’m not thinking any amount of swapping is going to be very snappy on a tablet. Once I get a browser with a few tabs open there’s almost zero memory left for anything else, so Goland is right out. :-/ Anxiously waiting for Purism to release a new machine that I can use for development (“coming soon”).
Any Librem 11 owners able to say what is normal for the memory footprint for gnome-shell?
My replacement display is still stuck in shipping apparently so I am uncertain.
At the risk of being irrelevant, my Librem 14 has:
Memory footprint (with only web browser open):
$ free -m
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 31974 1245 28408 178 2320 30093
Swap: 8191 0 8191
List of 20 highest sorted processes when sorted by VSZ:
$ ps aux | sort -k 5 -n | tail -n 20
myuser 1710 0.3 0.1 617564 44420 ? Sl 16:13 0:33 /usr/lib/mate-panel/clock-applet
myuser 1730 0.0 0.0 620544 31688 tty2 Sl+ 16:13 0:00 mate-volume-control-status-icon
myuser 1691 0.0 0.1 621256 48216 tty2 Sl+ 16:13 0:01 nm-applet
myuser 1364 0.9 0.2 693768 91600 ? SNsl 16:13 1:27 /usr/libexec/tracker-miner-fs
myuser 1549 0.0 0.2 711200 69188 ? Sl 16:13 0:01 /usr/libexec/ibus-ui-gtk3
myuser 1858 0.0 0.0 742100 30628 ? Ssl 16:13 0:00 /usr/libexec/evolution-addressbook-factory
myuser 1653 0.3 0.1 765848 35444 tty2 Sl+ 16:13 0:27 marco
myuser 1452 1.3 0.3 766552 119604 tty2 Sl+ 16:13 1:57 /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg vt2 -displayfd 3 -auth /run/user/1000/gdm/Xauthority -nolisten tcp -background none -noreset -keeptty -novtswitch -verbose 3
myuser 1425 0.0 0.1 782524 52712 ? Sl 16:13 0:00 /usr/libexec/goa-daemon
myuser 1661 0.3 0.1 811148 45100 tty2 Sl+ 16:13 0:26 mate-panel
myuser 1694 0.0 0.1 832856 33460 tty2 Sl+ 16:13 0:02 mate-power-manager
myuser 2688 0.3 0.1 908136 58464 tty2 Sl+ 17:43 0:10 mate-terminal
myuser 1683 0.0 0.1 952712 64300 ? Sl 16:13 0:02 /usr/lib/mate-panel/wnck-applet
myuser 1788 0.0 0.0 1007664 27644 ? Ssl 16:13 0:00 /usr/libexec/evolution-source-registry
myuser 1680 0.0 0.1 1018380 61176 tty2 Sl+ 16:13 0:00 /usr/bin/caja
myuser 1696 0.0 0.2 1028796 84092 tty2 Sl+ 16:13 0:00
So in my case, although I have no gnome-shell using 4 GB of virtual RAM, I appear to have pulseaudio using 2.7 G, the evolution-calendar-factory using 1.3 GB, and the gnss-share using 1.15 GB. Seems a bit silly to allocate 5+ GB to these given that I hardly use a calendar, am not currently playing any audio, and don’t care about my geographic location on the Earth and don’t need this device to track it.
But it’s important to remember that society and computers wouldn’t be able to function without a central intelligence agency to facilitate them.
[My PureOS install, to me, feels not very different from the default – but it’s different in the sense that I did sudo apt install mate and then chose Mate from the login screen instead of Gnome.]
“GNOME” (by whatever definition you apply here) is not managing Phosh. Phosh’s contributors are managing Phosh (and always have). We’re ofc thankful that Phosh is part of /World for multiple reasons outlined before.
Gnome is Google and Apple.
This is simply not true and you know it.