Main menu replacement Cardapio can truly boast to be a lightweight app, with it now using just 5MB of RAM when in active use.

The resourcefulness was the result of a bug report concerning a memory leak within the aoo. A bit of poking around by the lead developer of Cardapio, tvst, highlighted what the issue was.

Fast-forward a few hours later and the application had whittled down its typical* memory usage from under a hundred megabytes to just five!

Yes – 5MB.

*This typical usage is with default plugins except Software Center. On start-up Cardapio uses around 19mb which lowers to 5MB after a short amount of idle time (in which python’s garbage collector catches up, fact fans.)

Install Cardapio

Cardapio, like most ace apps, has a PPA for easy installation. This can be added to your list of software sources to allow for easy installation and automatic updating.

Open a terminal and enter the following two lines: –

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cardapio-team/unstable sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install cardapio

To add it to your desktop panel: right-click the panel, select “Add to panel”, then choose “Cardapio” from the list of applets.

You can then right-click on the applet to access the preferences menu.