GoKawiilNixOS trimmed to run stably on 512MB RAM via config changes
A NixOS user documented a multi-day effort to reduce the operating system's memory footprint, getting it to idle at roughly 96MB and complete a full rebuild within 512MB of RAM without triggering out-of-memory kills. By comparison, a stock NixOS deployment with cloud-init used 288MB at idle and needed up to 896MB to rebuild, previously causing OOM kills at 768MB on constrained setups. The changes included disabling kernel memory allocation profiling and reducing loaded kernel modules from 89 to 54.