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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

#41

Post by kergonath »

worthless-trash wrote: post #30
akdev1l wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MacOS handles memory pressure better than Linux imo (at least for interactive use cases) I have seen MacOS overcommit up to 50% of memory and still have the system be responsive. Yesterday I filled up my ram accidentally on Fedora and even earlyoom took several minutes to trigger and in the meantime the system was essentially non-responsive

This is with earlyoom/systemd-oomd enabled ?

From my experience it does not help much, and I still get occasional freezes when a program misbehaves on Linux. It’s not a huge problem, but it is a problem and it exists; I have been dealing with it for about 15 years with no significant improvement.

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#43

Post by shevy-java »

goalieca wrote: post #20

I hear a lot from linux users that found gtk 2 era on x11 as pretty close to perfect. I know i had run ubuntu and after boot it used far less than 1GB. The desktop experience was perhaps even slightly more polished than what we have today. Not much has fundamentally changed except the bloat and a regression on UX where they started chasing fads. I suppose the most major change on RAM usage is electron and the bloated…

The whole linux stack got bigger though - just look at what you need now to compile stuff, cmake, meson/ninja, mesa, llvm and so forth. gtk2 was great; GTK is now a GNOMEy-toolkit only, controlled by one main corporation. Systemd increased the bloat factor too - and also gathers age data of users now (https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954).

I guess one of the few smaller things would be wayland, but this has so few features that you have to wonder why it is even used.

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#44

Post by DullJZ »

akdev1l wrote: post #11
dangus wrote: post #5

I imagine the choice of desktop environment has most to do with RAM requirements in Linux. Unrelated to this, despite Ubuntu’s popularity, I think it’s one of the worst distro choices out there, especially for including old kernels for essentially no discernible reason. I wouldn’t go so far as defending Microslop but I do get tired of the Apple fanboys accusing Windows of being bloated and running poorly. They seem t…

MacOS handles memory pressure better than Linux imo (at least for interactive use cases) I have seen MacOS overcommit up to 50% of memory and still have the system be responsive. Yesterday I filled up my ram accidentally on Fedora and even earlyoom took several minutes to trigger and in the meantime the system was essentially non-responsive

macOS uses solid-state drives to do swap to help increase virtual memory. I can run multiple browsers and IDEs smoothly on my 8GB MacBook.

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#46

Post by groundzeros2015 »

mcswell wrote: post #18
trekkie99 wrote: post #14

Is this a Ubuntu issue or a Gnome issue? What about Lubuntu, Kubuntu, etc?

The article suggests that Xubuntu (which uses xfce instead of Gnome) uses much less memory. I don't know how true that is, but it seems reasonable that xfce uses some less memory.

We expect xfce is much more efficient (it has more basic features) but is that the cause? Are you just subtracting out a big part from a higher baseline?

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#47

Post by elcritch »

morphid-rabbit wrote: post #15
dangus wrote: post #5

I imagine the choice of desktop environment has most to do with RAM requirements in Linux. Unrelated to this, despite Ubuntu’s popularity, I think it’s one of the worst distro choices out there, especially for including old kernels for essentially no discernible reason. I wouldn’t go so far as defending Microslop but I do get tired of the Apple fanboys accusing Windows of being bloated and running poorly. They seem t…

Best kernel recommendations? Mainly for extremely long running (2+ years) SaaS applications. Stability overall. Is running a handful of docker containers and some binaries.

FreeBSD is touted for long running and stability.

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#48

Post by moogly »

anthk wrote: post #10

1: ZRAM exists 2: Win11 is not usable with 4GB 3: Trisquel 12 Ecne exists. You might need Xanmos as a propietary kernel because of hardware, but try to blacklist mei and mei_me first in some .conf file at /lib/modprobe.d. Value your privacy. Trisquel Mate with zram-config and some small tweaks can work with 4GB of RAM even with a browser with dozens of Tabs, at least with UBlock Origin.

The fact that I couldn't tell if point number 3 was a joke or not makes me confident we've still not seen the year of the Linux desktop.

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#49

Post by dangus »

dryarzeg wrote: post #39
dangus wrote: post #5

I imagine the choice of desktop environment has most to do with RAM requirements in Linux. Unrelated to this, despite Ubuntu’s popularity, I think it’s one of the worst distro choices out there, especially for including old kernels for essentially no discernible reason. I wouldn’t go so far as defending Microslop but I do get tired of the Apple fanboys accusing Windows of being bloated and running poorly. They seem t…

I am not an Apple fan, so I'll just tell my story. And yeah, it may be biased, and I may not understand something important. So around ~3 years ago or so I bought a lightweight low-end laptop (Intel Core i3, 14 inch display, 8GB of RAM) for everyday stuff so I could easily bring it with me everywhere I need to go (I mean, everywhere I would need it). It came with Windows 11 pre-installed. Now, for you to understand,…

I just logged in to my MacBook Air M2 (24GB RAM) with no programs open and it’s reserving 8.3GB of RAM and using 500MB of swap.

My Framework laptop running CachyOS with KDE Plasma with nothing open except System Monitor reserves 4GB with 500MB in swap (I enabled swap for sleep to hibernate, normally there’s no swap).

Reserving RAM doesn’t mean there’s a performance problem.

Most of the things you’re talking about in your comment have nothing to do with RAM usage and memory efficiency. You’re complaining about some annoying preinstalled OEM software [1], bad drivers, fan noise, battery life, and windows updates. That stuff isn’t great but a lot of it doesn’t have anything to do with Windows RAM efficiency itself.

If you download the Windows ISO from Microsoft and clean install you’ll have a pretty nice experience. I think Microsoft needs to crack down on OEM software additions.

As far as slow boot up times/slow initial setup I’ll remind you that Macs also have that as an issue during first boot and spend a lot of time doing initial indexing.

Linux mint is a great distro and I also prefer Linux to both Mac and Windows as well. Mostly my commentary is on the subject of people claiming Microsoft Windows is bad with RAM when we now see some Linux distros asking for more RAM than Windows. I think it’s quite clear that RAM isn’t the problem with Windows, it’s a lot of other things and the surrounding ecosystem.

[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.

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#50

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

john01dav wrote: post #25
goalieca wrote: post #20

I hear a lot from linux users that found gtk 2 era on x11 as pretty close to perfect. I know i had run ubuntu and after boot it used far less than 1GB. The desktop experience was perhaps even slightly more polished than what we have today. Not much has fundamentally changed except the bloat and a regression on UX where they started chasing fads. I suppose the most major change on RAM usage is electron and the bloated…

Just stick XFCE on a modern minimal-ish (meaning not Ubuntu, mainly) distribution and you'll have this with modern compatibility. Debian and Fedora are both good options. If you want something more minimal as your XFCE basd, there are other options too.

MXLinux is really great for something like xfce and I really loved the snapshotting feature of it too. Highly recommended.
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