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>I feel similarly about Windows. Way, way more resource hungry. Tens to hundreds of times, depending on the metric. You're incorect here as that's not an apple

>I feel similarly about Windows. Way, way more resource hungry. Tens to hundreds of times, depending on the metric. You're incorect here as that's not an apples to apples comparison. If you've got the RAM, Windows (and MacOS too I bet) does a lot of caching on boot of frequently used apps and files to RAM, as any sane desktop focused OS should do to give you a good experience, and it frees it back up as it starts to be needed by other apps. If you've got free RAM, why shouldn't the OS put it to good use to improve the UX? I never understood the obsession of many enthusiasts, to spec PCs with huge amounts of RAM, then smugly compete for the least amount of idle RAM used by their system. That's not the metric of a good desktop OS. What do you gain by just staring at large amounts of RAM that you paid for just sitting idle and unused by anything? RAM is there to be used, and if free RAM is available and the OS is smart about using it and freeing it on the fly to boost the UX, then please by all means go ahead and use as much as you want if that will improve the UX. My parents run Windows 10 on my 11 year old 4GB laptop with a spinning rust drive, using Chrome as a browser and it works without ever crashing or needing to kill apps, so IMO, Windows is stellar at managing memory/resources even when in very short supply. Meanwhile on the same laptop, Ubuntu's Gnome would just completely lock up after a long Chrome browsing session, or its OOM would just straight up kill Chrome, both cases yielding a much worse UX than on Windows, making it the far superior desktop OS in this case. IMHO a better and more realistic metric should be idle CPU usage, and how the OS deals with low memory scenarios, like the one I described above, not by how little idle RAM it uses on PCs with large ammounts of it as that's just pointless.

mwcampbell 4y ago
I think that's missing the point of the GP, because our Windows 9x machines with 64 MB of RAM also had plenty of room for cache. Of course, there have been real advances in GUIs since Windows 9x, and the 9x kernel was hardly state of the art even for its time. But I don't know if a minimum of 2 GB of RAM, and probably more like 4 GB for a usable system, is really necessary.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  You can't apples to apples compare windows 95 RAM usage logic with the one implemented in Windows 10/11. Of course old OSs used less.
  - nix23 4y ago
    >Of course old OSs used less. "Why" is the question here. New cars don't use more petrol. And new bikes are not heavier then old ones.
thom 4y ago
I’ve got 128GB of RAM and I would _love_ my OS to use it. But unless I’m explicitly blocking out memory by running a VM or loading a large dataset I’ve never seen it go above 20GB, and even that’s after turning off paging and tweaking windows to cache stuff more aggressively.
- nix23 4y ago
  Try ZFS.
GoblinSlayer 4y ago
Free RAM is used as disk cache and sacrificed to web 2.0 jabbscript SPA blogs that try to improve your browsing experience by consuming more RAM than you have.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  OS RAM usage and website browser RAM usage are two different things.
  - GoblinSlayer 4y ago
    They consume the same RAM. There's no infinite web 2.0 RAM.
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      My point was about who's using it. You can't blame the OS that bloated websites and browsers need too much RAM.
dijit 4y ago
That’s a common argument; but in Linux these are reported differently. I believe it is the same in windows and MacOS too. So “used ram” from the OS perspective cannot be reused as filesystem caches. I doubt they’re increasing performance either as the overall performance of such a system is so low. it’s also hard to argue increased performance when your app could have instead fit in L3 cache.
corrral 4y ago
But then they turn around and burn 100x (or more) the cycles-at-idle of 90s operating systems and constantly hit disk for no clear reason despite all this supposed performance-enhancing caching (try using Vista or newer on spinning rust—it's very clear that they're constantly doing disk I/O for normal shit like opening the start menu or just mousing over some UI elements, so much for "smart" caching of frequently-used things at boot). I absolutely do not think intelligent caching is behind enough of the increased memory use to absolve them of all the waste. I don't believe Microsoft are being more respectful of memory than they are of other system resources. It also fails to explain the huge increase in memory footprint of Linux desktop environments and window managers. I don't think XFCE is caching your most-used "apps" in memory at launch.

mwcampbell 4y ago

I think that's missing the point of the GP, because our Windows 9x machines with 64 MB of RAM also had plenty of room for cache. Of course, there have been real advances in GUIs since Windows 9x, and the 9x kernel was hardly state of the art even for its time. But I don't know if a minimum of 2 GB of RAM, and probably more like 4 GB for a usable system, is really necessary.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
You can't apples to apples compare windows 95 RAM usage logic with the one implemented in Windows 10/11. Of course old OSs used less.
- nix23 4y ago
  >Of course old OSs used less. "Why" is the question here. New cars don't use more petrol. And new bikes are not heavier then old ones.

thom 4y ago

I’ve got 128GB of RAM and I would _love_ my OS to use it. But unless I’m explicitly blocking out memory by running a VM or loading a large dataset I’ve never seen it go above 20GB, and even that’s after turning off paging and tweaking windows to cache stuff more aggressively.

nix23 4y ago
Try ZFS.

GoblinSlayer 4y ago

Free RAM is used as disk cache and sacrificed to web 2.0 jabbscript SPA blogs that try to improve your browsing experience by consuming more RAM than you have.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
OS RAM usage and website browser RAM usage are two different things.
- GoblinSlayer 4y ago
  They consume the same RAM. There's no infinite web 2.0 RAM.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    My point was about who's using it. You can't blame the OS that bloated websites and browsers need too much RAM.

dijit 4y ago

That’s a common argument; but in Linux these are reported differently. I believe it is the same in windows and MacOS too. So “used ram” from the OS perspective cannot be reused as filesystem caches. I doubt they’re increasing performance either as the overall performance of such a system is so low. it’s also hard to argue increased performance when your app could have instead fit in L3 cache.

corrral 4y ago

But then they turn around and burn 100x (or more) the cycles-at-idle of 90s operating systems and constantly hit disk for no clear reason despite all this supposed performance-enhancing caching (try using Vista or newer on spinning rust—it's very clear that they're constantly doing disk I/O for normal shit like opening the start menu or just mousing over some UI elements, so much for "smart" caching of frequently-used things at boot). I absolutely do not think intelligent caching is behind enough of the increased memory use to absolve them of all the waste. I don't believe Microsoft are being more respectful of memory than they are of other system resources. It also fails to explain the huge increase in memory footprint of Linux desktop environments and window managers. I don't think XFCE is caching your most-used "apps" in memory at launch.