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"Rising cost of memory," Microsoft explains why Windows 11 will use less RAM (www.windowslatest.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Pavan Davuluri says the rising cost of memory is why Windows 11 will use less RAM, with work on the memory manager, WinUI 3 and WebView2.

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[–] 167 points 1 month ago (24 children)

All it took was a RAM apocalypse for Microsoft ro consider improving performance in Windows. I'm seeing brand new laptops on display being sold as Windows 11 PCs with 4GB of RAM.

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  • [–] 128 points 1 month ago (15 children)

    It's hard for the younger generation to understand, but 4 Gb of RAM is MORE than enough for 99% of tasks if your software isn't written by lazy idiots.

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  • [–] 47 points 1 month ago* (1 child)

    When the Raspberry Pi 3 first came out I was shocked how much it could do with less than a gigabyte of RAM (it technically has one gig but it shares it with the GPU). Linux is ridiculously lean when packaged right.

    I have an Android tablet with four gigabytes of RAM that sometimes crashes running Firefox with multiple tabs, something the Pi somehow managed with a fraction the resources. Windows often struggled with eight gigabytes before I upgraded.

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  • [–] 23 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    WinXP ran quite nicely on 4GB of RAM. You could boot to the desktop in under 5 seconds if you had a solid state drive.

    All the day to day tasks someone needs to do with their computers haven't materially changed in the last twenty years since XP held the crown. In that time the speed of processors, storage, gpus, and ram has increased by literal orders of magnitude.

    And yet, somehow, things have become much shittier since then.

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  • [–] 26 points 1 month ago* (2 children)

    Because what used to be a native application that used 200 mb of RAM now needs to be a web application built on top of a browser using 4 gb of RAM to do the exact same task.

    I will honest to God pick fucking Eclipse over VS Code every single day, because at least it runs natively.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Yeah, I wish current devs would understand that I didn't buy a shitload of ram for them to waste it. I bought it so I could have a shitload of things running at the same time. I currently have like 6 applications running and I'm using 20gb of ram ffs.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    And they wish you to understand that you should be prepared to pay more for better optimised software, but you're not. If it takes significantly more time AND more experienced devs to build native applications versus webview based, the cost of building native might be as much as 5x more, but you can't raise the price and you won't get any additional sales, because people may complain, but nobody would pay extra for better performance.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago

    Is there some option where I can pay for an optimized version of Firefox? I certainly haven't seen it. What about windows itself?

    Nobody minded keeping things tight before ram got cheap but it's suddenly a problem now that it's expensive again?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago*

    I still remember having a 4gb of ram on win7, and it's enough for day to day tasks. The only thing that prompt me to upgrade to 8gb is games. It's not too far ago MS recommend 16gb as a baseline for win11.

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  • [–] 22 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    My friend bought one of those, paired with I think 64gb of EMMC storage which is basically an SD card. It couldn't browse the internet really with Edge in it's default settings. I had to disable so much crap but I got it usable with Firefox.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    It would probably run best with that really stripped down version of ChromeOS

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  • [–] 16 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Nah, with 4gb you can get away with most linux distros with XFCE, and you could even do some indie gaming. Plus, using ChromeOS means you're expected to have a network connection at all times (which makes things like using office suites locally a pain).

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