TBF I guess, it's the UI toolkits. I see this on Linux too - a "very small" app that does basically nothing except monitor a file for changes, takes many MB of RAM if it has a UI.

Since my RAM is almost never over half used, why not. Just make sure the OS swaps it out if something else needs a lot of RAM.

[–] ulterno@programming.dev 1 points 4 days ago

Yeah, even adding a default blank GUI, greatly increases memory usage.

I guess that's another reason to prefer CLI programs. They reduce the system resource you need to have free at any point of time to do whatever you need them to do.

In a condition when my computer is heavily swapping, I'd go with htop rather than plasma-systemmonitor