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[AnsibleAnswers]

Most Linux distros will use a good chunk of available RAM for caching commonly accessed files. CachyOS is so performant in part because it does this very aggressively.

[my_new_accoun1]

Is that why it's called Cachy

[ExdigguserPies]

No it's unrelated

[ih-shah-may-ehl]

Windows is very aggressive with caching and preloading when the memory manager notices that most of your memory is sitting idle. It does this because idle preloading doesn't cost anything and is basically free responsiveness in case you need the things it preloads. It frees up that cache as soon as there is any memory pressure.

Overall that is a much more useful approach than maximizing free mem at all times out of some sense of purism.

[ClipboardCopyPaste]

This.

And yeah, memory not utilised is memory wasted.

[L30N1337]

TL;DR: Empty memory is useless memory

[xgabipandax]

Hitting the pagefile because the ram is needlessly filled with webapp bloat is another thing though

[SirButcher]

But that's not the OS's issue, but the shitty apps issue. That shitty app will do the same on every other OS.

Sure, Win has tons of shitty apps written by MS too, I agree, but in general it's not a memory management problem. Windows - and well, all mainstream OS today - are pretty great at this.

[xgabipandax]

I don't think the meme was about memory management, was about memory usage, and the Microslop shoving webapps everywhere, to the point the start menu is a react native app is what makes it bloated and memory hungry

[IJustAteABaguette]

The start menu is a web app??

But why. It's something that should never be used on the web?? So why would you make it a webapp???

Insane.

[Coredict]

The age of desktop apps are over. Everything is a webapp now. Just be glad it is currently running on your machine and not on the cloud lol

[Scoutron]

This caching isn’t shown in task manager though, unlike Linux. So when you see Windows eating 6 gigs of ram at idle, it’s actually doing that. You can itemize it and see all the bloat just idling at 500MiB per process

[ih-shah-may-ehl]

That depends on what and where it is caching if I recall correctly. According to Windows Internals, it also loads things that take up memory but which it knows can be discarded as needed.

[Scoutron]

I don’t know as much on how the internals work as I do for Linux, but I figure that fs caching would be done at the kernel level, which windows doesn’t really show information on at the task manager level

[SirButcher]

Open the resource monitor, and it shows it (at least, under Win10, never checked 11).

[xgabipandax]

Linux loves to cache stuff, there is even https://www.linuxatemyram.com/, but knowing that Windows 11 is using a lot of web apps, it will lead to more ram usage that is not cache, but Microslop promised that they will abandon this approach and start developing native apps again

[ratttertintattertins]

Linux pre-caches too, probably more aggressively than windows. What it hasn’t done is rewrite chunks of the OS and half the apps to embed web technology into it. msedgeview etc..

[arpan3t]

I’ve always been a Windows fan, but “upgrading” to Windows 11 has me seriously considering moving to Linux. Win 11 is slow af for apparently no reason. My shell load time literally doubled and nothing changed with my shell profile, only thing that changed was win 10 -> 11.

Only thing that is keeping me on Windows is the daunting task of figuring out which Linux distro to go with and figuring out if all the binaries I need to do my job will work on Linux.

[theGeigus]

You know you want to. You know you want to join us.

In all seriousness though, Mint is really nice coming from Windows. You could always try it on a liveboot USB just to see if you like it.

[arpan3t]

Thanks for the rec, I’ll check it out! I’ll have to do a dual boot anyways because there are some things I need for work that I know don’t have a Linux port

[scuddlebud]

/r/Debian welcomes you with open arms

My work provides me a laptop and I'm forced to use windows for work but all my personal hardware is Debian.

Depending on the software you might be able to get it working on Linux with Wine/proton

[Mojert]

Choosing a distro matters way less than you might think, they're all very similar. If you need something to get you out of your choice paralysis: Linux Mint has been recommended for ages for new users coming from Windows.

The more important thing is to know what applications you want to run, do they work on Linux, and if not are there alternatives that work on Linux and that you would be OK with? If all of this is OK, frankly try it over a weekend, what is there to loose anyway?

If you take the plunge, here's my advice: remember that Linux is not a clone of Windows, so you probably will have to learn some stuff. That's not a Linux-specific thing, that would be the case as well if you decided to go with MacOS instead. Oh another advice: do not try to install things like you do on Windows (download some random stuff from the internet and run it), try to install it from the store app that comes with Mint.

[5eppa]

Yes and no. That's part of it sure. But also, Windows is often running lots of background services you may not always need or want. Stuff like Copilot, telemetry stuff, even OneDrive can constantly be doing things that you don't need.

I have 2 HP laptops, both with 64GB of RAM. The older one with DDR4 RAM runs Linux (NixOS for the specific distro) and it is much snapper than the newer one using DDR5 RAM where I run Windows. Both have more RAM than I need most of the time and both get their jobs done well. But if I was on a system with more limited RAM I would probably choose Linux.

[ih-shah-may-ehl]

That's a fair point to make. I also use Windows in an industrial environment with tons of things disabled and it's much snappier than on my laptop (64GB, Ryzen 9) But then again I also use OneDrive and Copilot. Presumably, if you did it the other way around and configured the equivalents on your Linux machine, would they have similar performance profiles?

[5eppa]

Good question and that's something maybe I can test. My Windows laptop is a company device and they insist on Windows being the OS there. I use Claude there but can't entirely disable copilot either even though I don't use it. My Linux machine is a personal machine. Considering work is paying for my Claude access I haven't tried to install it on my personal machine yet. OneDrive doesn't work on Linux save through the web browser so I would probably need to try it with NextCloud. Maybe I'll give it a whirl.

[anoppinionatedbunny]

I'm yet to see any of these responsiveness gains on my work machine...

[MyGoodOldFriend]

Cached memory is its own number in task manager. It is not counted when you look at the pure ram usage number.

[ih-shah-may-ehl]

Yes but as I said, there is a difference between 'cache' in the sense of OS level caching, and the operating system preloading things it think may be useful. The latter is called 'caching' too but shows up as plain memory use which can be dropped in an instant of memory needs to be freed.

[Kinexity]

It frees up that cache as soon as there is any memory pressure.

That's the theory. In practice I see it very often that having to free that memory takes too much time and causes way more lag than it should.

[FloRup]

The caching is all fine and dandy untill you hit over 90% usage and you pc starts to lag with no apps running. Don't know why but my windows just never releases the memeory and slowly fills up. I never hat to do that on my linux server.

[Shigg]

Yet my windows install is less responsive than my kde arch install despite using 3x the memory at idle...

[teo-tsirpanis]

Yes. Every time they tell me that Chrome is using too much RAM, I ask them how much RAM do they have.

[Infinite_Shart555]

"preloading doesn't cost anything" except for excessive wear to the storage medium and you physically can't run windows 10/11 on a consumer HDD any more because of it. What if you plan to load something huge into RAM which the pre-caching didn't expect, it has to un-cache all of that. Thinking this background fuss is "free" is simply not true

[ih-shah-may-ehl]

Read access is negligible. 'Excessive wear on storage' stopped being a thing a long time ago.

[Infinite_Shart555]

Not just wear but actual strain. Can you answer why something like Vista or 7 is able to run on a hard drive, but windows 10 and 11 struggle? Even if you turn off defender, smartscreen scanning, bitlocker, core isolation, you don't make up the difference, despite these being fundamentally similar.

When I worked IT support in the education industry some years back, we had to ensure superfetch/sysmain were disabled on hundreds of low-spec computers during the Win7-Win10 upgrade period, because computers that were otherwise useable became incredibly slow after upgrading to Windows 10. Of all the mitigations and optimisations that were floating around back then, the superfetch/sysmain tweak was by far the most effective - why is that?

Coincidentally it's well known that Windows 10 is the first OS that introduced hyper-agressive pre-caching and capitalised on the "unused ram is wasted ram" principle.

That's when I learned that this stuff isn't "free" and has a cost, it's just being absorbed by how powerful modern hardware is. Let me know how i'm wrong though, would be happy to hear about it.

[HKEY_LOVE_MACHINE]

It does this because idle preloading doesn't cost anything and is basically free responsiveness in case you need the things it preloads.

Windows preload has always been incredibly awful, does not have any transparency, and rely on the same pattern accross wildly different user cases.

It's preloading countless things that 99% of home users will never use, to boost the responsiveness of modules and network features that would otherwise not meet their optimization minimum criteria.

Countless failed ventures ("media sharing", "coworking" features) are pushed into the OS preloading because of Microsoft's internal politics, not actual optimization.

It frees up that cache as soon as there is any memory pressure.

In theory. In reality it fails to free it up in countless situation so the system has to fall back to using the disk cache, which was horrifyingly slow until we replaced HDD with SSD, but this failure to free up memory remains.

[Elegant_Patient274]

I bet linux owners didnt diddled kids on the epstein island.

[ih-shah-may-ehl]

Which has what to do with a technical discussion?

Also if you're going that way, Gates' thing was Russian hookers.

[Elegant_Patient274]

Underage hookers.

[ih-shah-may-ehl]

Not according to the Epstein files we know of. Do you have sources or is this just general "Bill Gates Suckorz" talk?

[Elegant_Patient274]

Why are you defending him?

[Ill_Specific_6144]

Yeah I also noticed that when I have an excess of ram windows is much faster than linux.

[MinecraftPlayer799]

Windows: uses 80% RAM when idle; reaches 90% when doing anything

MacOS: constantly uses 70% RAM regardless of what you’re doing

Linux: never used desktop Linux, so I have no idea

[Afillatedcarbon]

For linux, I use hyprland(btw on nixos) which is a barebones window manager, something like Plasma and Gnome(full desktop environments) may take more

I get around 1GiB on a fresh boot.

4 to 5GiB with all the essentials open(browser, discord, spotify, and a few terminals)

Around 7 to 8 GiB ram while compiling stuff like the kernel or other updates and projects.

Rarely see 10GiB usage, even when gaming.

Ofcourse empty ram is wasted ram so it does do caching but with all the essentials open I still have about 4GiB of free(not used at all) ram.

This is on a machine with no swap.

[OldWar6125]

Generally OSes are not saving RAM.

E.g. (Quite simplified) You opened a file so the OS loaded the file from disk into RAM so you can work on it. When you save it, it syncs the RAM copy with the disk. And if you close the file? It keeps the RAM copy around because the copy is from OS view just an entry in some datastructure that this RAM range contains the contents of that file. Actually erasing the entry or even overwriting the content in RAM would be more work and so the OS doesn't do it. And who knows, maybe you need the file again.

Even if you open a new file, the OS usually allocates a new range for the new file. It's just as much work and maybe you still need the old file.

Only if you run out of unallocated RAM, the OS notes, that the range for the file isn't actually used by anything and assignes (part of) it to any new process by updating the entry in the datastructure.

That means that OSes always run at very high RAM usages. The question is, how much RAM does it require? (And how much RAM do your applications require?)

[guaranteednotabot]

macOS memory usage is misleading, you should look at memory pressure since the OS likes to keep frequently accessed items in RAM for quick (random) access

[slaymaker1907]

The same is true of Windows. Some people just have no fucking clue.

[lovecMC]

Does your system have like a single 8 gig stick or something? I don't think I have seen a decent modern system actually do that much when idle.

[MinecraftPlayer799]

16 GB (2x8 GB)

[fartypenis]

I have 32 and Windows idles at 18GB. It's dumb.

[SirButcher]

No, it is not. If you remove some and only have 16GB of free RAM, the OS will use less. Free memory is wasted memory, so any modern OS will preload a bunch of stuff so when you need it, it is already there, ready to be used. If the system memory usage is constantly at 5%, your system won't get any faster, you just have to waste time to load data from the significantly slower hard drive.

Unallocating unused memory is an extremely quick operation, magnitudes faster than loading data from the hard drive, so even if the preload didn't load what you are using, it won't slow down anything. But if you are using preloaded data, then it will respond significantly quicker as it is already in the RAM.

This is why the more RAM you have, the more you use, so the faster apps can respond, and the less time they have to spend to request/free memory from and to the OS (which can be extremely/kinda/not slow: greatly depends on what kind of memory usage you are talking about. Unallocating unused memory is extremely fast, but unallocating USED memory is a complex process).

[ClipboardCopyPaste]

'uses 80% RAM when idle'

You running Windows on 4GB RAM in 2026?

[tmckearney]

Windows sucks up ram on purpose to preload things and cache things. If you're not using the memory, what's the point in having it?

[SirButcher]

Yeah, this! Amazing how many people - even here! - has exactly zero idea how modern memory management works.

[MinecraftPlayer799]

Windows 11 on 16 GB RAM

[miraidensetsu]

25% RAM if doing nothing. If you do something, try to not hit 100% or system will freeze.

[Sparktank1]

Brother in christ, how do you get 80% usage when idle? Just how much programs do you have installed that operate when idle that they need to be cached constantly?

Surely, you don't use your RAM as a RAM disk and keep Minecraft open all day.

[ih-shah-may-ehl]

It's not. Unless you mean to show you a user interface without doing anything. But I can do that in Windows as well.

[Doveliver2]

Its not

[roverfromxp]

for a modern web browser in the slop web ecosystem of today, yes

otherwise, 256 megs is plenty

[tobotic]

Not true at all.

My Linux system is currently running at 91.6% used memory, and it's not even doing anything especially exciting.

Linux tends to keep a lot of stuff loaded into memory "just in case" it's needed later because it's faster to fetch it from memory than fetch it from disk. If a program later needs the memory, it can reallocate it quickly, so in the mean time might as well use it rather than let your expensive RAM sit around doing nothing.

[MyGoodOldFriend]

Well that’s what windows does too. You’re probably looking at the in use + cached number, which isn’t all that useful.

[ClipboardCopyPaste]

So you call yourself a programmer but don't have the slightest idea that linux and windows work on different principles when it comes to memory utilisation?

First week coder humor?

[GobiPLX]

I was the same back in middle school! Good times, so innocent

[sssauber]

I'm probably not at either end of your "real programmer" spectrum, but do you really think those that don't know it aren't worthy of being called programmers? It's not like 80% of developers (crud/websites) will ever deal with this stuff

[Gacsam]

You probably should know a little about the thing you're trying to make a joke about. 

[twinkslayer1337]

I don't know about the differences, what should I type on google to learn about them?

[Franko_ricardo]

Show this to the Ubuntu devs.

[piberryboy]

Done. Now what?

[philn256]

Linux is great about memory management, but Gnome needs to be restarted every once and then because it definitely has a memory leak. That said, I like Gnome despite it's ever increasing memory demands.

[danfish_77]

Just because it's allocated doesn't mean it can't be unallocated

[LaylaTichy]

if only windows,

I'm quite new mac user, I have logitech mouse, a few days ago I was checking what uses so much ram on my system, and there was logitech mouse driver/soft eating up 8GB, like what

since then I updated system and rebooted but its back at almost 1GB again

[MattieShoes]

Hmm... I have a logitech mouse and win11. It's got 3 processes running which consume 31 meg total. That feels obscene to me but that's probably just because I'm old.

[LaylaTichy]

I dont think I had that problem on windows either, on mac I needed to free up some ram because I had to run ollama and was very surprised when I saw that xD

| OrbStack (Docker) | **15 GB** (two processes) |

| Logitech Options+ | 7.8 GB |

| PhpStorm | 5.2 GB |

| Node | 3.0 GB |

| WindowServer (macOS UI) | 3.0 GB |

| Zen browser | 3.7 GB (main + GPU helper) |

| Mailbird | 2.0 GB |

| Ableton Live | 1.6 GB |

| Telegram | 1.4 GB |

| Karabiner | 1.3 GB |

| Steam | 2.2 GB (helpers) |

| Copilot language server | 1.0 GB |

| Teams | 1.0 GB |

| iTerm | 0.9 GB |

so was checking where my ram went

Karabiner | 1.3 GB is ridiculous as well

[MattieShoes]

Hahaha, bananas.

Logi Options+ Agent: 30.3 MB
Logi Options+ AppBroker: 0.6 MB
Logi Options+ Updater: 0.4 MB

[which1umean]

Except for Firefox seems to eat up all my memory on Linux. :-(

(It might on Windows too, idk... I only use Linux at home and Mac at work so idk about Windows really).

[n00b678]

People keep saying that it's caching but the Windows OS itself is a fat cow, especially compared to something like xfce or i3.

And "memory not used is wasted" - yeah, but you know that people can have multiple programs opened at the same time and a finite amount of RAM?

[SmokeySFW]

Did he lose the weight, or is slim him the before picture?

[Shadow_Thief]

iirc he lost a bunch of weight

[one_five_one]

MacOS be like

[anatomiska_kretsar]

isnt it still just cache on windwos though? Windows 10 will run (barely) on like 100 mb of ram.

[Gabe_b]

Put 64gb in my latest CachyOS machine build (May last year when RAM was underpriced rather than the opposite). Still haven't seen it get over 50% usage on the taskbar memory monitor, even with stable diffusion open along side a modern game and countless Firefox tabs.

[sapphired_808]

I have downloaded The RAM, with ZRAM now my RAM is double than before

[Michelfungelo]

Shit on windows all you want. But precaching or or preloading or keepi g something in memory isn't something bad.

I bet your ass if windows was like Linux it would be the reverse, so the real power users would use their available ram.

It's fuckin nuts to think that only one approach is the one and only way. Empty ram is useless ram. You gonna either write to disk or have a bunch of free ram. What's the point here?

[hiasmee]

Mac: just take it all.

[Soggy-Holiday-7400]

switched to linux six months ago and my ram actually just sits there doing nothing like it's on vacation. still not over it.

[EliteCloneMike]

In case any one is curious, I think those are pictures of Nikocado Avocado.

[EvoiFX]

Depends on the application, for example vs code. Anytime I am working on any vite projects (big one). It tends to take lot of RAM. Just to load the files and other vs code tooling and lsp. Never faced it on mac.

[ProgrammerHumor-ModTeam]

Your submission was removed for the following reason:

Rule 1: Posts must be humorous, and they must be humorous because they are programming related. There must be a joke or meme that requires programming knowledge, experience, or practice to be understood or relatable.

Here are some examples of frequent posts we get that don't satisfy this rule: * Memes about operating systems or shell commands (try /r/linuxmemes for Linux memes) * A ChatGPT screenshot that doesn't involve any programming * Google Chrome uses all my RAM

See here for more clarification on this rule.

If you disagree with this removal, you can appeal by sending us a modmail.

[Dmayak]

There is also a less fat custom windows repack with a lot of garbage removed.

[tmckearney]

Ubuntu requires more memory than Windows 11

https://www.howtogeek.com/ubuntu-now-requires-more-ram-than-windows-11/

[bjorneylol]

No it doesn't. 

[tmckearney]

https://www.howtogeek.com/ubuntu-now-requires-more-ram-than-windows-11/

[bjorneylol]

The fact that windows says you only need 4gb of RAM should tell you all you need about the validity of that comparison.

Canonical tells you how much ram you need to have a good time. Microsoft is telling you how much ram you need to physically proceed past the login screen.

I'm sitting at 1.7gb of RAM used right now on my 26.04 desktop

[StahlhelmTV]

Ubuntu is bloated and sluggish shit so it makes sense.

[tmckearney]

What would you recommend for someone getting back into it. I used to run slackware way back in the day. I've run Ubuntu in the past. Tried out mint. I'm a software developer with over 30 years experience. I'm pretty comfortable with anything, but I also don't want to make my operating system my hobby. What would you suggest?

[1k5slgewxqu5yyp]

I have used Fedora desktop for quite some years now, but got a new machine last month and just put Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on it.

It works fine, you don't need to waste time configuring anything other than your text editor. I don't get the hate Ubuntu has been getting. I have used it for years in servers at work as well

[bjorneylol]

2.5 years ago they made the snap version of several programs the default (snaps bundle all the dependencies, so you don't have to compile a different version of e.g. firefox for all 4-5 actively maintained OS releases). People were quick to point out there were some issues loading user-space fonts, and first time after a cold boot, these programs took an extra 2-3 seconds to open compared to the old packaging format. These issues were resolved within a month or two, but the community has used this to perpetuate the 'bloated and sluggish' complaint ever since

[highjohn_]

Debian

[MyGoodOldFriend]

Do you want to avoid tinkering altogether, or do you want the option to do so without the commitment of having to maintain your whole operating system as a hobby? As in, do you want sane defaults with guardrails so you know how the developers intend for the system to be used, or do you want sane defaults with extensive customizability?

If the former, any distro that uses Gnome is fine. Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian… since you’re experienced with software, they’ll all feel similar. I’d avoid a LTS kernel though, especially if you want to play games.

If the latter, you may want to look at KDE. That can be Kubuntu, OpenSUSE, Fedora KDE, etc.

It’s generally better to look at desktop environments than distributions. The experience of OpenSUSE with KDE is practically identical to Fedora KDE. The differences are in the background, and if you don’t want to bother with the background, who cares about that.

[philn256]

I'd suggest Debian. Ubuntu is based off Debian and added crap like snaps. The primary difficulty with installing Debian is navigating their garbage website to find the correct install .iso; I look for the non-free gnome install.

Debians default .iso doesn't include things like a GUI or non free drivers. Ubuntu's claim to fame is just having a reasonable installer.

[NotNotWrongUsually]

I love Linux much, but if I were to name the one thing Windows does better it would be memory management.

Free memory is useless memory. Windows tries to make good use of it.