Like the particular programs are no issue, but the whole UNIX-userspace as done in the mainframe era and still is. Like you definitely need cooperative program suspend/resume like on Android for any kind of sane battery life, but that's unfortunately completely missing in case of GNU/Linux.
Nothing. On my phone there's 770MB RAM consumed by the entire system with Phosh running right now. The rest is free to be eaten by the browser.
If anything, it's GTK that can be rather inefficient when it comes to rendering (both GTK3 and GTK4, but for different reasons). There are some tricks that phoc (Phosh's compositor) could still learn too, but it will get there.
I was looking at this and thinking maybe it would improve a cheap android phone. But now I know it's running gnome I won't even consider trying
Not in a million worlds. Android is by far the most optimized OS (as a whole, including user space, graphics stack everything) for mobile devices. It's almost like the most widely used mobile operating system has had quite a bit of dev hours spent on it.
edit: oops, the topic was RAM usage. in 2026. of course everyone, it's definitely the 200MB usage surplus that makes your phone feel heavy. let's add 1TB of RAM to a C2D and it will be ready to be paired with a 5090.
It actually is though? My Pixel 9a has a perfectly serviceable CPU but I am often frustrated by its 8GB of RAM. Switching to the Revolut app to generate a disposable card number consistently evicts my browser tab from RAM. ~100% of the time this happens and I get extremely frustrated by it losing my state in the checkout flow.
Why should software not adapt to reality?
As another data point, take a look at what "embedded" development means today. It is increasingly common to just simply have a device running full Linux, as it is getting cheap enough to do so.
Additionally, minimum requirements of Android 17 are way above what SXMO allows.
With Phosh you would have a point but SXMO is lighter than a modern Android.
Add a bunch of fat, semi-desktop binaries that actually provide some kind of functionality to make it remotely comparable, and then you just have a worse, fatter system that runs hot and wastes the battery.
Android is a unified system working together to make the device race to sleep as fast as possible, with as few wakeups as feasible (e.g. batch together events that would wake up the device).
In terms of resources I think it's roughly going like this, from lighter to heavier:
SXMO < Lomiri (Ubuntu Touch) < Plasma mobile < Android < Phosh < Gnome mobile
I could also add XFCE but they officially don't support mobile.
Android isn't the lightest mobile environment by any conceivable means, maybe it's the most featured but certainly not the most optimized for low-end devices, the days of Android 11 are over.
You need 4GB of ram, a good CPU and full hardware acceleration to run modern Android.
And if the next Android bumps the requirements again, I would put it at the end of the list.
Gnome is a bloated mess of a thing and I hate it. Why would anyone want their desktop to use over 1gb of ram. I have a 32gb laptop and I still loath the idea of throwing away memory on such a bloated awful thing.
Running gnome on a phone. Yeah... No
It uses some GNOME services, namely so it doesn't have to invent it's own. None of these services are memory heavy and all have a purpose (e.g. managing Bluetooth)
Without any different numbers, I think saying a massive memory hog is a little hyperbolic. Applications in use, especially browsers, are going to dwarf the desktop environment anyway. Having the polish is well worth it to many people, myself included.
I would definitely like to see less memory requirements for the various desktop environments, but at the end of the day I don't pay for any of this
> Seems like a very strange bundle to bring in for an extremely power constrained device, where every % of increased battery drain is noticed by the user
I'm sure you can make your Frankenstein version that would be 10% as usable and secure as phosh by removing everything but for most users, 100mb more ram and 1% more battery drain for an OS aiming to be a daily driver is something that's worth it.