Used to build “little old lady” computers for neighbors and such. Say someone gave me their shit PC to fix. Fine. Throw in whatever extra hardware I had, clean it up, new thermal paste and whatnot, small SSD, Linux Lite, Chrome, “Here’s how you get email and internet.” Never once heard from them again.

Here’s the secret sauce; I never once mentioned “linux” or even began explaining what I had done. No need to talk OS, it was “windows” to them! I was there to fix computers, not evangelize.

The RAM impact of the OS is nothing compared to that of modern apps which are all browser-based.

The fact that one can use a wm/compositor to make the desktop lighter is sick. I was using 350MB idle with Alpine + River, it is so damn snappy.

I came to Linux for freedom and stayed for the performance.

me remembering my first computer with 4mb of ram and 250mb of hard disk space.

I was running Plex, Jellyfin, Nginx, rtorrent with 3k torrents and few other containers and they were running on a very old machine with 4GB of RAM and only 2GB were really used.

All that extra telemetry that you can’t turn off uses a lot of resources it seems

I like that this is both true and false.

The memory management of an OS is almost always entirely dependent on what it’s doing or designed to do. Linux and Windows are able to do similar things, but are rarely tasked with the same workloads.

Windows desktop (aka, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, 11) are designed to be more pretty and run desktops that the user will see/interact with, etc. I will say that Microsoft knows their audience and the windows prefetch stuff is quite good, all things considered…

Windows server on the other hand… Until recently, it still shipped with IE11 as the only browser. Of course as soon as you started it, the whole system would complain and tell you to go download edge… Server is a beast unto itself.

Additionally, as an IT support person, I always prefer people have more RAM than they need, rather than less. Getting that figure just right is nigh impossible. And if you have the RAM, you should use it, right? Because otherwise, why would you have it? It becomes a waste of money.

Prefetch and memory caching is a good use of memory, and a big reason why Windows has very little memory actually “free” at any given time… I’ll note, I’m mentioning free memory, not available memory.

It’s a fascinating topic, honestly.

With all that being said, I’m not saying that Windows is actually better in any way. My entire point is that there’s merit to the different methodologies of the different operating systems. They’re built differently and that is a good thing.

This is just a straight up lie lol. Donald Trump levels of nonsense. New low, fellow Linux users.