I actually just switched from a laptop with 4G of RAM this year. It had a spinny drive so it was a little slow, but I was really only using it to watch videos over the network. This was all very snappy once it booted. Opening Firefox was pretty painful and would cause swapping though.
Well, Windows as such don’t need more RAM as some Linux distros, What is wasting the most RAM is all the telemetries, services not needed, trials, adware and other crap which Windows has by default when you buy it with a new PC. Windows need average users because of this capables to fix it, not needed in Linux. That is the difference. A gutted Windows is pretty fast, without all the trash which is loaded on boot. Eg,only diseable the hybernation service reduce a big part of the RAM, because it make duplicates of all open apps as temporary files, to load these on the next startup. same with the index service to find files somewhat faster, which waste memory to write any change to the index, not really needed in mdern PC and less with an SSD. Only diseabling this 2 services can increase the speed and respond more than 50%.
But the normal user don’t do it and only claimes that Windows becomes slower and slower, because it is more and more filled with temp and trash files. That is the problem with Windows, because MS sells you a car, but by default with a huge caravan which you don’t need, that must tow.
Not if you have Firefox open. Three YouTube tabs and my 4GB Pi5 is swapping so hard it takes forever to move the mouse anywhere.
Firefox fixed its memory hog problem for a bit after 2016 or so and immediately got to work on how to get just as bad again.
microSD or NVMe?
My hope is that with the end of Windows 10 coming up, laptops with 7th generation CPUs will become really cheap, such as ThinkPad P51 and P71. They are a decent budget choice < 1k USD/EUR already, but might drop way under 500 with top specs.
It’s not like they are useless, but the market for Linux users should be satiated quickly once a selling panic sets in.
For most use cases, including backend development, they’ll be good enough for many years to come. tbh, I’m still happy with my i5-2500 from 2011 and 16 GB RAM, and that is with local DB, application server, IDE and everything running locally.
They already are. Last year I bought a 7700k with gtx1080 for 250, and bought a similar 8600k with gtx1080 for the same price around christmas. Those things run everything we throw at it, running Linux.
Tbh you can probably make a Linux install act like windows if you wanted. So that’s another point in favour of switching for people who are undecided. It can be as slow and bloated as your windows install if you want it.
I dual boot. It’s so painful to go back to windows but some work related software doesn’t run at all in Wine. Perhaps I should VM W10 or W11.
Can I run WoW on Linux?
It is possible, you’ll need some extra application though. I believe Lutris. Perhaps there are other ways, never tried wow on Linux.
I think it’s easier to VM an Apple device and run it from there lol
Well… Not exactly, Linux doesn’t handle low RAM very well. Usually the system just crashes if you open too much stuff
what is this? If something, it is low RAM that Linux handles extremely well ?!?
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As someone who was forced to start using Windows again after ten years after ten years of exclusively running Linux: Why is it like this? Everything is so crappy and slow!
I’m dual booting on my laptop cuz I need windows for something, but 8gb ram is too much on Linux and the same amount of ram is too little on windows, Like I have 170 processes and 6gb ram usage at idle with my apps running in background, very poor memory management.
Linux aint perfect either. Look at the memory usage of most modern “fully featured” distros. They’re using damn near as much at idle as windows is. Same thing going back 10 years in time.
The key is with windows you get one windows, and maybe some tweaks. With linux you could go with a hyper minimal DE with not much in the way of shiny features and go a whole lot further.
Linux also uses a lot of ram for disk caching, it’s flagged as a form of available memory so there’s no performance overheard for this.
I’ve never seen a distro take more than 2gb RAM ootb (ubuntu gnome and kde are probably the “heavy” contenders), excluding precached files. In either case, Windows or Linux, you lose big time the moment you launch a web browser.
The fresh install of Manjaro KDE on my laptop is using 2.6gb on a fresh boot right out of the box.
I forget what distro it was (maybe neon?) that was using like 3.X gigs of ram on a fresh install. That was the point that I realized this wasn’t the Linux of old.
For shits and giggles I just tested out Ubuntu 25.04 and it’s only 1.3 gigs with it’s stock Ubuntuified de.
For as much shit as Ubuntu gets it’s really not that bad compared to some of the others.
Its logging half your shit, and trying to advertise to you anywhere it can! Get used to it…
And ontop of that, they have no incentive to work on performance, if they made it better you’d have less of a reason to upgrade your machine, they want to slowly make performance worse and worse to maximize this effect
If you upgrade your machine it becomes easier to sell you AI, since AI will work faster on an upgraded machine. Hence it’s a win-win for Microsoft.
Except now I’m on Linux
It’s always been like this. Those 10 years ruined you as a Windows user.
I have recently booted into dad’s decade(s?) old xp pc and was baffled by how snappy that thing was…
XP was snappy at first, but then I used to install a couple of programs and things started to suck big time. It was always the registry. At the time, a lot of people I knew, used to just format Windows on a regular basis, also because the spyware and malware were so prevalent.
It’s nearly the same for me, except it’s been nine years, and I’ve been using both Linux and Mac. It’s not bad enough to look for a new job, but oh man, I hate it so much.
Why use a mac when you can emulate it in linux? (heck, even with GPU passthrough!)
My company gave it to me for work, and I used it, just as I do now with the Windows machine.
windows 11 straight up requires 16gb of ram now.
it idles at almost 8 (!!!) fucking gigabytes for some stupid reason.
It’s using the unused RAM for caching so it can be slower faster
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Im so old, but 8 gb still seems like such a large amount of ram when I think of it briefly. And peeps out there with 100 gb lol. But yeah my win11 laptop that has 64 gb, it’s slower than my 10 year old amd fx desktop mint with 20 gb. By a lot.
it is! its just windows 11 that’s very ram hungry.
I don’t understand why my PC is so slow
I am working to decommission a windows server, which is currently using 500gb ram, and i have moved all functions to a different application, same purpose and very similar underlying methodology… 32gb of ram on linux. it’s crazy how much bloat windows admins are willing to accept.
Part of growing up dirt-poor is making use of any hardware possible. I excel so much at that skill now thanks to all the open source projects out there (the WM, DEs, distributions, TUIs, …). I can really squeeze a lot from a tiny host & having this mentality as a dev now is some times appreciated 😄.
Some times. :/
16GB RAM on windows is more than enough
And pretty sure 4GB on linux sucks
So I’ve done a Linux install on a 4GB Chromebook, with 16GB eMMC storage, and what I learned is that it really depends on what you use the machine for, and which distribution you run. If all you’re doing is word processing, managing emails, and browsing on YouTube, you can absolutely run Linux comfortably with 4GB, provided you pick one of the leaner Linux distros. For reference I ran Gallium OS, which was a Xubuntu flavor specifically tuned for lower end Chromebooks.
ETA: In comparison, I had a relative who bought a laptop off those TV sales networks that had a similar CPU RAM and storage setup, except running Windows 10…it ran slower than a snail, and one day it had a Windows update that was too large to fit on the combined RAM and page space. The poor woman couldn’t use the computer because the update forcibly ran in the background and consumed all her memory every time she turned it on. So yeah, you can’t game on Linux with only 4GB of memory, but I am confident that I can do a major OS update on it at least.
Sure, but it stops at that
