On 11/5/2011 5:58 PM, Jason Hsu cried from the depths of the abyss:
>
> In my cynical opinion, I think this is no accident.  The most
> lightweight distros WANT you to see how much RAM is in use.  antiX
> Linux looks good when it shows that it's only using something like 40
> MB at idle.  The heavyweight distros don't want you to see how much
> RAM is in use because it would make them look grossly inefficient.
> It doesn't look good if the OS needs 500 MB of RAM just to idle and
> 2+ GB of RAM to do actual work.
>

They are not being cynical.

Let's be real here.  8G of RAM (DDR3) costs about $40.00 these days 
pretty much anywhere for desktop use.  Based on this, who cares how much 
ram is being consumed during idle for a desktop.  If it's not enough, 
$40.00 more will get you up to 16Gigs.

What you call Heavy Weight/bloated I call normal.