Anyway to decrease RAM, or reset it without turning off/on the OS?

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Another thing you might try:

  1. Uninstall everything you know you won't use. Watch your dependencies, only do the uninstall from the command line, and if you see it wanting to remove any Gnome or Zorin packages, cancel it, that package can't be uninstalled due to dependencies. Keep track of everything you've uninstalled (and the packages that have been uninstalled because they're dependencies)... if you need some functionality back, you'll know quickly which package to reinstall.

Or, if you need some functionality back:

  1. Disable execution of packages that can't be uninstalled but which you know you'll not use. For instance, I disabled Evolution completely:
sudo chmod -x /usr/libexec/evolution-addressbook-factory
sudo chmod -x /usr/libexec/evolution-addressbook-factory-subprocess
sudo chmod -x /usr/libexec/evolution-calendar-factory
sudo chmod -x /usr/libexec/evolution-calendar-factory-subprocess
sudo chmod -x /usr/libexec/evolution-scan-gconf-tree-xml
sudo chmod -x /usr/libexec/evolution-source-registry
sudo chmod -x /usr/libexec/evolution-user-prompter
sudo chmod -x /usr/libexec/evolution-data-server/addressbook-export
sudo chmod -x /usr/libexec/evolution-data-server/csv2vcard
sudo chmod -x /usr/libexec/evolution-data-server/evolution-alarm-notify
sudo chmod -x /usr/libexec/evolution-data-server/list-sources

Or you can navigate (as sudo) to those files, right-click them, select "Properties", select "Permissions", uncheck "Allow executing file as program".

  1. Limit how much your virtual (RAM) file system uses:
    /etc/fstab
# Set up TMPFS from mount -l.
none										/run			tmpfs	rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime,inode64,mode=755,noexec,size=1G								0		0
none										/dev/shm		tmpfs	rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime,inode64,size=1G												0		0
none										/run/lock		tmpfs	rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime,inode64,noexec,size=1G										0		0
none										/sys/fs/cgroup	tmpfs	ro,nosuid,nodev,noatime,inode64,mode=755,noexec,size=1G								0		0
none										/tmp			tmpfs	rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime,inode64,size=1G												0		0
none										/run/user/1000	tmpfs	rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime,inode64,mode=700,uid=1000,gid=1000,size=1G					0		0

If I don't run my cache-preload script, my machine only takes 9 - 10% of memory (1.1 to 1.3 GB).

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