Comment on Maybe the RAM shortage will make software less bloated?
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 10 hours agoOther oses use significantly less ram so yeah I think it’s fair to say windows uses too much ram.
Comment on Maybe the RAM shortage will make software less bloated?
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 10 hours agoOther oses use significantly less ram so yeah I think it’s fair to say windows uses too much ram.
uncouple9831@lemmy.zip 9 hours ago
It does not particularly matter if a fresh windows install uses 2 gb while a fresh Linux install uses 1 gb if you use a web browser. The web browser will use more ram than any operating system.
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
I don’t quite follow what you’re saying here but I can say without hesitation any version of Linux versus any windows version of the same era have been night and day for me performance wise. And I’ve been trying the two since windows 98 days.
uncouple9831@lemmy.zip 4 hours ago
Op seemed to be blaming ram bloat on the OS. That demonstrates ignorance of the true ram users on a given system.
Oom=out of memory. It doesn’t matter if Linux uses 500-1000 mb less ram than windows if your system locks up for 5 minutes the moment it encounters memory pressure. Linux oom handling is bad, even as recently as this year. I ended up switching my laptop back to windows because I couldn’t handle it.
Linux has this weird polarity: category 1 Linux fanbois are like look I can run this on anything (which is kind of a silly distinction because the thing that makes an os big or small is the services, not the kernel, but since windows doesn’t ship that many low-resource variants I think this is mostly fine). Look I have 3 mb of ram and the kernel runs, yay.
Then you have category 2 fanbois who get bitchy whenever you bring up the OOM issues and other things along those lines and say “well you have to size your system for your usage, and you have to predict that 5 years in advance and if you don’t we can’t help you”. These are, I assume, the category of folks who develop chromium and it’s ilk.
Somewhere in between is the vast, vast, vast majority of consumers who want to buy something at their price point and have it work for a few years in spite of changes to the non-OS world. The rise of chrome, the rise of electron apps, these are not things you could expect your average consumer to predict…and none of that is particularly impacted by the few mb extra that windows uses vs linux.
And for good measure let’s shit on apple for a moment: selling 8gb computers in 2025 is a fucking crime. I know they stopped, but it was still a fucking crime. I have their 16gb version because one can never have too many computers I guess, and it comes screeching to a halt any time I open too many tabs (still better than Linux).
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
It sounds like you have a lot of experience with running out of memory that I don’t have. I’m curious – how much ram do you have in the laptop you switched to windows? I don’t think I’ve experienced running out of memory recently. Been running Linux for like 3 years now and I’ve always felt every possible aspect is far snappier. Regarding ops comment about windows being the ram problem, I think they just were referring to it using a lot of ram, which it does. You’re calling it a few Mb and that’s just not accurate. I can’t say for sure what exact difference it was for me, but years ago I compared windows 10 to pop os. I think the difference was not far from a GB. And we can split hairs about what specifically occupies ram. Services, kernel, third party apps. The fact is that windows culture is different in a very bad way. You have to opt out of apps running on startup constantly, manually checking settings under an “advanced” tab often… I vastly prefer the culture of bloat being opt-in in almost every case. There are dozens of reasons I prefer Linux but the fact that it just runs faster without effort specifically to make that happen, is atop the list.