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I am using Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. After looking at the activity monitor, I realized that gnome-software uses more memory than the gnome-shell itself, and I don't even have the GNOME Appstore running!

The amount of memory taken up varies throughout the day, although I think that it usually dances around 300 MiB, with gnome-shell around 240.

I tried reinstalling gnome-software but it still is a memory hog.

How do I stop this from happening?

EDIT: Here's a picture of the Activity Monitor, showing gnome-software and gnome-shell.

enter image description here

EDIT: What's weird is that when I'm rendering a project in Blender (Professional 3D Graphic Design Program), gnome-shell STILL takes up more memory than Blender...this doesn't seem right...

AFT
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  • How much memory are we talking about? Is this of concern? For me it is 131 MB right now on Ubuntu 21.10. I did not realize that it kept running indeed. It could be uninstalled, or perhaps be prevented from autostarting. – vanadium Mar 10 '22 at 10:03
  • @vanadium Yes. The GNOME Shell is known for taking up a lot of memory...but the fact that gnome-software is taking up more of it while it's not even open is concerning. The memory taken up is different throughout the day. At the time of writing this, it was at 301 MiB. I have just included an image of Activity Monitor. – AFT Mar 10 '22 at 21:02

2 Answers2

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GNOME software is known to use a relatively high amount of memory for quite sometime, and the issue has been partially resolved in recent versions.

You have several options.

  1. Open system monitor and kill gnome-software every few hours.

  2. Remove GNOME software and use synaptic package manager instead.

    sudo apt remove snap-store
sudo apt remove gnome-software
sudo apt install synaptic

  3. Use KDE ecosystem instead of GNOME. In general, KDE Plasma consumes a lot less memory than GNOME and GNOME software.

  4. Upgrade to the most recent stable version of Ubuntu, since the issue has been addressed in recent versions of GNOME software.

N0rbert
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Archisman Panigrahi
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  • On Debian 12, removing gnome-software also removes gnome-core and task-gnome-desktop, which makes updating and upgrading harder. – cweiske Jan 26 '24 at 06:26
  • I'm on Ubuntu 24.04 now, and gnome-software uses a whopping 2~3 GB of memory at times. – Green 绿色 Sep 03 '24 at 01:15
  • @Green绿色 Just get rid of it and use synaptic – Archisman Panigrahi Sep 03 '24 at 03:00
  • @ArchismanPanigrahi That's probably what I'll do. Although I find it great in principle, I actually seldom used it because it doesn't load the app information on my system. In the end, I end up on the command line to install an app anyways. – Green 绿色 Sep 03 '24 at 03:48
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GNOME software is really much resource consuming. If you want an alternative, I can suggest using Flatpak and install your favorite applications via command line or just browse at https://flathub.org/apps.

Install of flatpak without GUI:

sudo apt install flatpak
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:flatpak/stable
sudo apt update
sudo apt install flatpak
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

To install enter:

flatpak install flathub \<ENTER HERE APPNAME\>

Or copy the appname from Flathub.

Pablo Bianchi
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127 001
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    How is flatpack supposed to lessen the memory problem ? – DrakaSAN Mar 10 '22 at 13:13
  • using CLI of flatpak and uninstalling gnome-software should free up the memory. As interface using the web interface would be eyecandy, too. So yes, without gnome-software and with using flatpak it should free up the memory – 127 001 Mar 10 '22 at 21:03
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    @127001 If the goal is simply to remove the need for the GUI installer, using apt directly would do the same without having to install anything that is not there by default, am I missing something ? – DrakaSAN Mar 11 '22 at 11:37
  • oh yes, I think you are right. The main idea was about the web interface which is offered by flatpack but I forgot that there is apturl, too. – 127 001 Mar 12 '22 at 02:00
  • Usually also works just flatpak install <ENTER HERE APPNAME>; it will show the alternatives and ask to proceed – Pablo Bianchi Feb 27 '23 at 20:52