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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

#61

Post by heelix »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #32

I was testing them on a HP laptop I bought for $200 with 4GB of RAM. Windows, its default, used so much memory that there was not much left for apps. Ubuntu used 500MB less than Windows in system monitor. I think it was still 1GB or more. It also appeared to run more slowly than it used to on older hardware. Lubuntu used hundreds of MB less than Ubuntu. It could still run the same apps but had less features in UI (eg…

Consider a dedicated SSD for each OS. You should have a couple M2 slots in the laptop. What you can do is remove (or disable) the Windows SSD, install Linux on the second drive, and then add back the windows drive. Select the drive at startup you want to be in on boot and default the drive you want to spend most of your time in. I did that on my XPS and it was trouble free. Linux can mount your NTFS just fine, without having to consider it from a boot/grub perspective.

https://community.acer.com/en/kb/articles/16556-how-to-upgra...

Looks like you got space for 2 drive.

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#62

Post by ScislaC »

shevy-java wrote: post #43
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 ha…

Is the option of legal compliance a bad thing? They have corporate customers.

If there's no opt-out, that's a different story.

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#64

Post by rantingdemon »

danparsonson wrote: post #31
jmclnx wrote: post #27

>Linux's advantage is slowly shrinking Maybe in some ways, yes. But there are distros out there that can run easily in as little as 1G RAM. And I heard people have used it with far less. I also remember hearing Ubuntu moved to default to Wayland, if true I have to wonder if defaulting to Wayland is part of the problem because Gnome / KDE on Wayland will use far more memory than FVWM / Fluxbox on X11. FWIW, you can do…

Not to mention that 'lower memory usage' is only one of many benefits and, at least before the prices went mad, hardly the most important one on the list.

Practically speaking most people would want a GUI though.

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#66

Post by okeuro49 »

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…

I used gtk2, it was ok, but I preferred Ubuntu's Unity interface when it came out.

Gnome 3 seems similar to Unity nowadays, and it is pretty good.

I find it much easier to use than Windows or Mac, which is credit to the engineers who work on it.

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#68

Post by crimsonnoodle58 »

bjackman wrote: post #37

The article itself acknowledges that the headline is bullshit: > The change isn't about the core operating system becoming resource-hungry. Instead, it reflects the way people use computers today—multiple browser tabs, web apps, and multitasking workflows Basically the change reflects the fact that, at this level of analysis (how much RAM do I need in my consumer PC), the OS is irrelevant these days. If you use a web…

Exactly. The headline is clickbait.

It doesn't matter how efficient your kernel or DE is if users expect to be able to load bloated websites in Chrome.

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#69

Post by senfiaj »

From my understanding this is an official statement, not a benchmark result.

> The change isn't about the core operating system becoming resource-hungry. Instead, it reflects the way people use computers today—multiple browser tabs, web apps, and multitasking workflows, all of which demand additional memory.

So it is more about the 3rd party software instead of OS or desktop environment. Actually, nowadays it's recommended to have 8+ GB of RAM, regardless of OS.

I just checked the memory usage on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS after closing all the browser tabs. It's about 2GB of 16GB total RAM. 26.04 LTS might have higher RAM usage but it seems unlikely that it will get anywhere close to 6GB.

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#70

Post by dryarzeg »

dangus wrote: post #49
dryarzeg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

It does in my own experience (so it may not be a problem for you, I agree, but it is a problem for me). Because when OS allocates ~50% percents of RAM for itself and isn't letting it go, then other software simply can't use it. Therefore, you're limited. Your potential performance is capped at certain level just because your OS decided to allocate half or more of your system RAM. Why? Well, just because it wants to.

> have nothing to do with RAM usage or performance

Well, to be honest, most of them don't. But would you please explain then, why it takes around 20 seconds just to boot up, while for the aforementioned Linux Mint (and I'll clarify that it's currently 22.3 for me, the latest version, it was 22.1 at the time as far as I remember) it's only around ~3-4 second to take me to the login screen and then another second (at most) to load everything after I have logged in? Could you also, please, explain how does it happen that even GNOME's Nautilus file explorer takes less RAM and far less CPU usage than Microsoft's Explorer (and I won't even mention Thunar, that's kinda unfair)? What about "Start" menu in Windows which spiked up CPUs just by opening/closing? There's a lot of performance issues, both with RAM and CPU usage.

I'm not saying that these problems are unique to Windows, no; but saying that Windows doesn't have any performance issues is not really true.

> 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.

I agree with you here. That's true. A large part of the problem comes not from the actual operating system, but from the application software. I thought once that well, maybe if RAM shortages will last longer than for just one or two years, that will be bad, but also, maybe - just maybe - some software developers will start to think at least a bit more about optimization...

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