That’s not entirely true, unless you choose to nixify everything. You can just have a basic Nix configuration that installs whatever programs you need, then use stow (or whatever symlink manager you prefer) to manage the rest of your config.

You can’t entirely forget that you’re on NixOS because of FHS noncompliance but even then getting nix-ld to work doesn’t require a lot of effort.

No C program is written to satisfy a borrow checker and most wouldn’t compile with one, so adding it would require rewriting the world anyways. At that point why not choose a language that, in addition to being memory safe, also drastically cuts down on other kinds of UB, has sum types, sane error handling, a (mostly) thread safe standard library, etc.?

The mentioned performance governor runs the CPU permanently at maximum frequency, which is obviously bad on battery powered devices and on devices with lacking thermal headroom. I think it might cause problems in virtualized environments as well but I’m not sure about that.

Many people who don’t know what they’re talking about in this thread. No, used memory does not include cached memory. You can confirm this trivially by running free -m and adding up the numbers (used + cached + free = total). Used memory can not be reclaimed until the process holding it frees it or dies. Not all cached memory can be reclaimed either, which is why the kernel reports an estimate of available memory. That’s the number that really matters, because aside from some edges cases that’s the number that determines whether you’re out of memory or not.

Anyway the fact that you can’t run Linux with 16GB is weird and indicates that some software you are using has a RAM leak (a Firefox extension perhaps?). Firefox will use memory if it’s there but it’s designed to cope with low memory as well, it just unloads tabs quicker so you have to reload often. There are also extensions that make tab unloading more aggressive, maybe that would help - especially if there’s memory pressure from other processes too.