I think the problem is that you used OS X for a year. I've been using my Mac for 4 years, and Linux for another 4. And I have Python (in fact I have at the same time Python 2.5, 2.6, 2.7, 3 and 3.1 for testing purposes), I have installed so many packages I already lost the count. You only need to be sure the path is correct when doing it. And I have 2 Gigs of RAM. Mac OS can be a bit hungry, but there's an "easy" solution for this. Closing unused applications. That bright dot in the dock means something is using an incredible amount of RAM just to sit there doing nothing. If I only leave open my mail app, Chrome, emacs and twitter client, I can go for days without ever hitting the disk cache. If I start adding more things (or tabs like I'm crazy), I'll hit the cache, of course. But this also happens in my Linux systems, it's not a Mac OS problem. As for the DVI port... I usually leave the DVI adapter linked to the monitor I use. And use bluetooth devices when possible. So far only once I have used a hub to connect 3 things to my Macbook (an SD reader to copy images, my Ben Nanonote to install some packages and my iTouch to sync with iTunes). Happened once, in 4 years (and I also have a drawing tablet, btw).
That's not a solution, that's a workaround. I'm sitting here with a 4GB RAM machine running Arch Linux with XMonad. I usually run the following applications in day to day usage:
- Firefox Nightly with 50-100 tabs (largest memory hog,
the rest doesn't even come close)
- Thunderbird
- Pidgin
- XChat
- smplayer, which I usually keep open
- deluge
- mpd + ncmpcpp
- half to one dozen of terminator instances with zsh,
most running some text mode applications like vim,
htop or the aforementioned ncmpcpp
I reboot my PC once in a blue moon, usually after kernel updates. otherwise it's running 24/7. Right now, I sit at ~35% memory (and that should include memory used for disk caching), a bit less than half of which is Firefox with ~16% (65 tabs). I usually never go over 50% unless compiling heavy stuff (like QT level heavy). I don't really know what the fuck OS X does to eat all that RAM, but it apparently does something wrong.
Emulating a setup similar to yours, the OSX machine infront of me sits a 2.8GB active, of which a little less than 800MB are taken by Terminal.app due to me having activated infinite scrollback and having two rails processes being hit 8 hours a day since like forever as I develop. So it's really closer to 2GB and I didn't even try hard. This includes mds+mdworker (the indexer) which clocks in at 200MB. Normally I also have LibreOffice, Pixelmator, iCal, iTunes, Reeder, VMWare Fusion, which makes it balloon to 3.1GB and up as I open more documents/VMs.
