So, I made the switch to Linux Mint about 2 weeks ago, and have been having some issues, specifically with gaming and art programs.
The issues seem to be related to memory. I don’t have the memory to open a large art file in either Krita or GIMP. My Coral Island game keeps crashing (OOM - kill process).
So, it would be easy to assume my computer just doesn’t have the memory for these activities, except . . . they worked fine on Windows. I could open my art files in Photoshop and Coral Island ran like a dream for months.
It’s disheartening because everywhere I look says the issue must be with my machine not having enough memory. But my machine could run everything just fine when using a different OS (with way more things installed).
Does anyone have any help or insight they might be able to provide? I have no interest in going back to Windows.
Thank you!
**SOLVED - increased the swap to 8 GB, which seems to have solved the issue for now. Thank you, everyone, for your help!
As lime mentions, look at swap. The Mint installer should have suggested it, but if not it’s pretty easy to setup after the fact (just use a swap file instead of a partition). Windows does this as well and it should pretty clearly deal with OOM.
Coral Island has a platinum rating on ProtonDB so it should be absolutely no sweat to run if you have the resources.
Looks like increasing the swap worked! Played for ~40 mins without any crashing, freezing, or lagging. Thank you so much for your help!
We have increased the swap and will try to play again after dinner. Thank you!
how much memory do you have? how much swap? usually linux uses less memory than windows.
8 gig memory, 2 gig swap
hm, not too much but not so little that it should cause a problem. maybe there’s something running in the background? i’ve not used mint for a while but i think you can see all running programs in the system monitor.
Didn’t see anything that stood out on the system monitor. Increasing the swap seemed to have fixed it for now, but I’ll probably do a bit more looking to see if I can figure out what caused the issue in the first place. Thank you very much for your time and help!
Have you ran a memory check? Linux and Windows use memory layouts pretty differently so you may have avoided the bad bits before that are now an issue. https://memtest.org/
Thanks for the resource!
The other thing to do would be to see what is using so much memory. You can use
htopAnd sort by memory use.


