I suspect the high memory usage OP saw on Linux was a combination of: - swappiness: they said they switched swappiness to zero but my guess is that by that

I suspect the high memory usage OP saw on Linux was a combination of: - swappiness: they said they switched swappiness to zero but my guess is that by that time their mind was made up. Also, from the mention of swapping and the mention of apps being slow to come back to life, I really think this was the main reason for their memory issues. For reference, high swappiness will make the kernel will push memory for apps into swap to the benefit of caches. Default is 40, I have not seen one single case where that is a good thing in 12 ro 15 years. Do yourself a favour, make your first CM rule to switch swappiness to zero! - the myriad of small apps in a lot of modern Linux distro (pieces of systemd, pieces of gnome (even on servers!), dbus, etc...). They are minimalistic distors out there which use a very small footprint - the way memory is reported: If you look at free, the first line shows free memory as what's not in use by apps, cache nor buffers. If anything, free memory on the first line is memory that the OS is wasting (not using). If you want to know what is available for use by apps, you have to look at the second line (-/+ buffers/cache)