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Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

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Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#191
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buy why that much? The first computer I bought had 192MB of RAM and I ran a 1600x1200 desktop with 24-bit color. When Windows 2000 came out, all of the transparency effects ran great. Office worked fine, Visual Studio, 1024x768 gaming (I know that’s quite a step down from 1080p). What has changed? Why do I need 10x the RAM to open a handful of terminals and a text editor?

Higher res icons probably add a couple hundred megs alone

Well if you have a 512x512 icon uncompressed it is an even megabyte, so that makes the calculations fairly easy.

But raw imagery is one of the few cases where you can legitimately require large amounts of RAM because of the squaring nature of area. You only need that raw state in a limited number of situations where you are manipulating the data though. If you are dealing with images without descending to pixels then there's pretty much no reason to keep it all floating around in that form, You generally don't have more than a hundred icons onscreen, and once you start fetching data from the slowest RAM in your machine you get pretty decent speed gains from using decompression than trying to move the uncompressed form around.

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#192
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the Windows 11 requirements are ludicrous. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-specifica... 4GB of RAM? What? I guess if your minimum is "able to start Windows and eventually reach the desktop", sure? I wouldn't even use Windows 11 with 8GB even though it would theoretically be okay.

> 4GB of RAM? What? I guess if your minimum is "able to start Windows and eventually reach the desktop", sure? I wouldn't even use Windows 11 with 8GB even though it would theoretically be okay. Not okay as soon as you throw on the first security tool, lol. I work in an enterprise environment with Win 11 where 16 GB is capped out instantly as soon as you open the first browser tab thanks to the background security sc…

I was about to rush to the defence of Windows 11, thinking it couldn't possibly be that bad, and just checked mine. I booted a couple of hours ago and have done nothing apart from running Chrome and putty, and whatever runs on startup.

Apparently 13.6GB is in use (out of 64GB), and of that 4.7GB is Chrome. Yeah, I'm glad I'm not running this on an 8GB machine!

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#193
I have the state of the art Windows 11 Canary Version 29560.1000 (Beta) version running on a PC with 4GB of RAM which is not even officially supported. Ironically Microsoft themselves overrode their own requirements for me as I was one of the volunteers from the Windows 10 Dev Channel days as they wanted those who helped them create Windows 11 see the final result as a "thank you" even though the hardware was not officially good enough.

I don't know how they have done it but with the latest updates to Windows 11 (In the Canary Channel, Optional 29000 series) it is VERY fast in Chrome, even on a PC with just 4GB Ram.

So all those mocking and laughing say you might just get a window up haven't a clue what they are talking about. It WAS terrible but now it is much much better. I don't know how they have done it but they have. It might be due to Microsoft's aim to rewrite the kernel in RUST and other things.

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#194
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [1] I have to assume you’re talking about some third party antimalware program because the Microsoft one absolutely does not behave how you describe. Editing without specifying that you have edited your reply is not very good, you know. But okay. Actually, I'm talking about the Windows-shipped Microsoft Defender process (at least it seems to come from Microsoft Defender). I have not seen anything third-party instal…

Does it behave like this all the time or just at specific moments? I find on my Windows system it's only doing things when specific actions are happening. Right now the antimalware executable process is using 196.4 MB of memory and 0% CPU for me as I type this. When I download an executable from the Internet and run it, the CPU usage spikes to 8-10% briefly and the RAM usage goes up by 30MB or so. I have a much highe…

> Does it behave like this all the time or just at specific moments?

Strangely, but these were... specific moments, but not too specific. I mean, it wasn't running from the startup till the shutdown, but I also don't remember any specific triggers such as running untrusted applications or something similar. However, I guess that, according to the CPU usage, it most probably were full system scans. One thing remains unclear though: why, despite me turning off this feature, it was still quite frequently (I'd say way too frequently for normal operation) performing the full scan. I have no ideas. I'll not list everything I tried and checked here - because it would be too long - but the most "suspicious" thing I downloaded at the time was ImHex executable. And I don't think any anti-malware would spend ~80% of CPU processing power just to scan one relatively small app. I checked different things that could trigger it - but found nothing.

> Right now the antimalware executable process is using 196.4 MB of memory and 0% CPU for me as I type this.

Likely because it's idle as you type this. It wasn't using all of my CPU resources all the time, it's just that it could randomly spike up at some moment, run for ~1-2 minutes (sometimes more), drag the system into thermal throttling despite the active cooling (a bit of hyperbole here but still, it was really able to heat hardware up) and then disappear.

> if it's doing an active periodic scan.

As I mentioned, most likely that was the issue: frequent periodic full-disk scans.

For me, the worst thing was not that it was happening at all. To be honest, the worst thing was that I didn't understand why it was happening or how I could fix it. I just felt humiliated by the system that I, supposedly, owned. I know that I might have done something wrong or missed something, but... That still doesn't feel any good, you know.

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#197
post #191
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher res icons probably add a couple hundred megs alone

Well if you have a 512x512 icon uncompressed it is an even megabyte, so that makes the calculations fairly easy. But raw imagery is one of the few cases where you can legitimately require large amounts of RAM because of the squaring nature of area. You only need that raw state in a limited number of situations where you are manipulating the data though. If you are dealing with images without descending to pixels then…

Aren't they usually all preloaded to prevent pop-in (or using some sort of heuristic)?

anyways, I bet there's like a million little buffers all over the place in the graphics stack. It would be neat to go through all that and just see how slim you could get it, even if it broke a bunch of stuff.

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#198
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the Windows 11 requirements are ludicrous. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-specifica... 4GB of RAM? What? I guess if your minimum is "able to start Windows and eventually reach the desktop", sure? I wouldn't even use Windows 11 with 8GB even though it would theoretically be okay.

Win11 IOT runs great on 4gb if that matters :) I have a few machines in the field running it and my java app, still over a gig free usually.

(and yes I tried linux, I don't think my users would have the patience to deal with the sleep/wake issues :) )
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