If your processes require RAM, it’s fine to use it. Windows obviously has many processes like that and reserves lots of RAM.

A Linux system can also have RAM-heavy processes if you choose to install and run them. In that case, a high RAM usage indicates that these processes are functioning correctly. Conversely, very low RAM usage suggests that the system is running as intended, assuming you haven’t installed unnecessary applications.

While RAM usage numbers can tell you something about installed and running processes, they don’t necessarily tell much about system performance. High or low values alone don’t definitively tell you whether the system is running well or poorly.

Based on my usage of Linux, Windows 10 and Windows 11, I have no doubt that Windows 11 uses at least 1-2gb more of ram. It runs like crap on older PCs while Windows 10 runs okay. That's the true test.

I've dealt with AI and know the history with hallucinations. Today Hallucinations are more of an issue when it's a controversial topic (politics, religion, or issues the political influencers have taken control of in the media).

They're fed training data pushing a narrative preferred by the AI developers, who leave out the contradictory info. It's a lot like social media moderation. Ultimately, there's a group of individuals at the company who think a certain way and think the rest of the world should think like them too. It's more of an issue after the R&D model has been turned into a commercial variant at the company by the engineers there and it's out of the hands of the Ph.Ds who originally made it.

As soon as you prompt a basically decent AI to not rely on a training data or a superficial web scrape, and it goes looking for contradictory info, then it re-thinks what it told you. This is more of an issue with the commercial corporate subscription AIs and the older small LLMs from years ago that didn't have web scraping capability. Things have definitely changed in the last year or two where the dense models with web scraping capability are concerned. At least, if you go with the uncensored or ablitterated "Thinking" versions of them available on the Huggingface site, or you use a third party service to access a large open weights model that's been made uncensored by whoever maintains it.

It's relevant. To sum it up, this much smarter-than-average part of the PC user base routinely uses Linux rather than Windows 11. A part of the user base that is far more familiar with relative performance of both on the same hardware.

All three of my PCs running Linux have 16GB in them. Never run out of RAM.

People run Linux with full plasma desktop with like 8 gb ram. It's the browser that eats up several gb from that, not the desktop. Desktop alone is probably 4 gb max.

But sure, depending on what else you run, you want more memory. But if windows recommends 32 gb just to run the system, that's crazy.

I guess I’ve been living in lala land or something because I’ve been perfectly happy with half of that.

Teams is the most performance inefficient shit I've ever been forced to use.

We use both Zoom and Teams for meeting with partners. On my piece of shit work laptop, I have no problem with Zoom. Teams on the other hand will randomly cut my audio, lag my cursor, or cause peripherals to stop working when I'm in a meeting. I simply can't fathom how it's as bad as it is.

That's because Teams is a piece of shit, not because 16GB isn't enough normally.

When it's being used, stuff gets slower - so yes, I technically use it as an indicator, by noticing that my machine is slow because it's out of free ram

No. No I can play games on Linux without capping my 16.

Edit: yes I checked page file use, dip-ass. Not counting GPU ram.

And CachyOS running KDE Plasma is the most RAM hungry setup. I took a Win 11 laptop with 8gb and threw Debian running Xfce and that's using like 300mb of RAM lol

I haven't heard of that since the Vista days, totally forgot about it. Doesn't make sense, I've been all-flash* (E is still HDD for backups, no programs) for well-over a decade. Maybe I should disable it and see if it makes a difference. C is a Samsung 960 Pro and D is a Western Digital Black SN750 in raid0, so it's not really helping even if it is doing something...

Flatpaks bring all their own libraries with them rather than using the system ones.

• (plus) you avoid dependency hell, apps "just work"
• (minus) centralised version updates are less effective for bug and security fixes; all flatpaks must be updated separately
• (minus) all flatpak apps take additional disk space since they bring everything with them
• (minus) all flatpak apps take additional memory; Linux can't keep a single copy of a library read-only in memory if multiple apps are using it

I think they have their place for apps that are under very heavy development, or for apps which are extremely "resource heavy" in comparison to the system resources that they use (by which I mean, games). I wouldn't want my bread-and-butter system utilities to be flatpaks.

The number of people that still don't understand this, even after it's been discussed ad nauseum for decades is frightening.

Unused RAM is wasted RAM. You want it used. You want cached data there for instant access. What matters is how much is available for something else if you need it, and Windows does a shit job of getting that info across.

I'm pretty sure I have the pagefile disabled; both C and D are NVMe drives, and D is raid0. I disabled superfetch a few minutes ago, rebooted, and don't see any performance impact, but the used memory when idle is now 10GB, vs the 19 in that screenshot. No other changes.

I could see the appeal if I was using a platter drive for my programs or frequent data, but it's not 2008 anymore. I'd rather see actual usage over 'the computer knows best'.

E: me spell good

In order for left to right:

• AMD software updater
• HASS.Agent
• Sophos Home
• Synology Drive
• Wireguard
• spacedesk
• Haven (discord replacement)
• Vesktop (alternative discord frontend)
• AMD software
• Creative Sound Blaster Command
• Signal
• Rainmeter
• Telegram
• Bitwarden
• Logitech G Hub
• Playnite
• Steam
• Trucky
• ShareX
• KDE Connect
• f.lux
• Wallpaper Engine
• NextDNS
• Windows Security

Steam is far and away the biggest resource hog at 450MB, I'm assuming mostly from the browser engine.