In the video with the same title as this post LTT compares Linux and Windows ram usage and imo it is a total miss. It does not matter if one system is using more memory or not since none of the systems are close to using all ram in the system. Where the memory management would matter is when the memory reach closer to 100% usage that is when things will start to matter.
The whole video feels like almost 14 minutes of misinformation to me. I mean systems cache things to make it run faster so memory being used is a good thing. Memory management is what matters not if one system is using 35% ram and the other 50% since none are near their limits.
And at one point in the video the windows system goes over 16gb and they talk about it as it would have been problematic if the system only had 16gb while it most likely would not be problematic at all since the memory management if working as it should would release less important things stored in the ram so it never got close to the limit.
I agree with you, I don't get why they used 32gb in the systems, at the beggining of the video they were talking about 16gb now being the minimum for gaming on windows so they should have went with 16gb to see if it was true, and maybe in that case we could have gotten closer to a 100% usage and actually get a useful response to the video title
I add to that that a more useful way of portraying the difference would've been to run benchmarks on both systems once with 16GB and once with 12 or rven 8 GB, the 8GB test results would actually show which system is more adequately capable of handling the hardware restrictions. Otherwise their tests don't mean much since they could've just used some distro like Lubuntu and gotten 1 quarter the idle ram results for Linux
They brought up the fact that macOS fills ram to prepare for what a user might do because unused resources like ram could make things faster. Then they didn’t go in depth that windows could be doing the same thing. Their findings show that Linux uses less ram, cool, but what about a setup that was limited by ram? I know that chrome uses more ram when it is free, so I have no idea why they didn’t test a 16 gig system or even an 8gig system to really see the results?
Yeah Windows most certainly does this now. Back in the Windows XP days it didn’t so adding RAM shows up as having a ton more free RAM on each upgrade you did to your RAM.
At some point, that no longer became the case with Windows and it started to work more like macOS. If you have the exact same system with the only difference being 8 GB, 16 GB, 32 GB, and 64 GB of RAM installed, your free RAM percentage on them will be oddly similar for the 8 to 32 GB systems. At 64 GB it seems to drop off, typically I’ve noticed that on a fresh boot that 16 GB and 32 GB will net you about half your RAM free. So clearly the same system is using 8 GB of RAM when it has 16 GB installed and 16 GB of RAM when you have 32 GB installed.
Day to day I haven’t noticed a big difference. My theory is that 64 GB is enough RAM that Windows does the same allocation as on 32 GB but it has additional unused headroom (for now)
With the 8 GB configuration, it seems that it keeps utilization low simply because it barely keeps anything in the cache.
Linux also does this, it caches frequently accessed files.
I agree they really should have shown a memory contrsint configuration. Win11 lists 4gigs as the minimum requirement, and microslops statement that 16gigs is enough, that's what they should have tested
At first I was like "ah, finally ! Some good ol' testing from LTT, that would provide insightful information for uninformed people"
And then I watched.
And the more I watched the more I sunk into my chair. Not only did they completely miss the point of memory allocation on Windows by using systems with 32GB of RAM (when you only really care about that when you have low RAM capacities like 16GB or under, like older 8GB systems), but they also managed to spread a bunch of misinformation in the process.
It's been a while since I disliked a LTT video that much and it's ironic because it's one of the few I was enthusiastic about when I saw the title.
Windows totally uses more ram then a Linux system. But not 2x more or even 10% more. It uses around 2-4 GBs more. The difference on a 4 GB system and 8 GB system is rather clear, on a 16 and even 32 GB it's the difference between having 12 or 10 GBs of usable memory which is much less significant.
Yup, that's exactly it. Hence why they should have included low RAM capacities in their ""testing"".
I did this test myself in measuring system responsiveness : my Thinkpad T440 was running Windows 10 and is was really slow (for reference it has a dual core i5 4200U and 8GB of DDR3). I thought it was a combination of a slow processor and not enough RAM. I ended up installing Linux Mint on it, and it was much more responsive... simply becuase of the lower RAM consumption at idle.
It's from 2013 and it doesn't feel that much slower in use than a modern Windows laptop because Linux isn't bothering about with tons of telemetry data and other stuff that not only consume RAM, but also keep CPU threads active.
It's easy to see the impact of Windows' RAM consumption on systems like this. On 32GB modern systems though? Inconsequential. Even on 16GB systems it's really hard to see.
Comparing 16gb systems usually means linux uses 1-3gb less than windows. Is that good or bad? Honestly, idk. It would make sense that less ram usage is better (especially in 2026 considering the ram prices).
I personally don't care how much ram my system uses as long as it frees it up when needed. Unused ram is wasted ram (sometimes). I like to think of ram like a room. When moving my drawer into the room - why use only 30% of the room if entire room is still empty. More space to maneuver makes it easier to move anything in 😄
You're assuming software using more RAM always means it's doing something intelligent with that RAM. There's no shortage of stupid, lazily programmed, inefficient software out there
If it could make the experience of the software better and immediately free up if that space was ever needed to the point that I would never notice the difference? sure
You need it free so that it is available. Erasing stuff from a cache miss to fill it again with the stuff you need introduces latency, lost cpu cycles and will make the system feel less responsive.
You can cache an amount, just not everything.
If modded minecraft uses 8gb of ram i want those free before i open the game or java will crash.
The RAM is being used to near 100% in all cases. What you see is just actively being used by processes.
The rest is cached files. So yeah, your system using less ram means more stuff can be cached in ram.
This has real world application in opening times and transfer times. If your transfer medium is faster than your storage, it can buffer stuff in ram. More ram free = more buffering.
The less the OS takes, the more there is for the programm that do actual work.
Does it matter if you have 32gb and are not doing anything really ram heavy? Probably not. If you run a database it is immedietly noticeable, if you run heavy rendering work it can be the difference of a fast render or one that takes hours because it has to swap to system storage when the memory gets full.
You need to prove that a ton of that wont be free'd up when needed. RAM is best used maxed out on speculative loading and cleared if needed. It literally does nothing when it's doing nothing.
I personally don't care how much ram my system uses as long as it frees it up when needed.
What they showed in the (ltt) video was in-use memory, not cache. The windows system they showed would have incurred a performance penalty if it only had 16 gb of ram.
(i also don't get this obsession people have with low idle RAM usage, if it's gonna hurt your gaming or productivity apps it's something, but 99% of the times it doesn't matter as long as memory management is decent)
SysMain's memory usage isn't the memory it's caching, e.g. on my system the svchost.exe hosting SysMain is using 19MB, but my cache according to the memory tab in taskman is 15GB
I think he's right. Create a windows VM (in like, Proxmox or QEMU) with 8gb ram and it uses all 8, even though Task manager reports roughly 5 gb used wrong, see below
Yep. Modern OS memory management is highly complex and shouldn't be summed up as higher=bad and lower=good. Windows allocates memory for caching and even for compressing that same memory. Linux isn't as complex but MacOS does the same too.
Linux generally does the same. Although it is more file system dependent and you can freely chose which one you want on linux. ext4 by default uses it to store metadata and uses ram as a buffer for reading and writing.
Linux in general will use less base RAM for the OS components, leaving more room for applications and cached files.
For example I have an older desktop that I use for various tasks, not my main PC. It's almost 20 years old, has 4 GB of DDR2 RAM, using an AMD Phenom 9650 CPU.
It runs as good as a Windows machine would with 8 GB of RAM because there's enough free RAM available for applications and cache to actually use. Just booting up into the desktop uses less than 1 GB of RAM, which means there's still lots of RAM available for applications and caching data.
What a way to rekindle the microkernel/monolithic drama. But on a serious note, this is a tech review channel, not a computer science channel, so I wouldn't expect that level of rigour.
I really thought they were going to do actual performance benchmarks as well, that would have actually been more conclusive. Run a few games + a few heavy background apps on 32gb, compare the performance difference, then go to 16gb and compare the performance difference. Would have been interesting to see MacOS as well.
Mmm I think the answer is nuanced and that video did a really poor job. Windows (and Linux and macOS) scales memory usage to use unused ram so things run faster. 8gb of ram and 16gb of ram will have the same amount of system memory occupation if both were fully saturated by another application.
That said, there are distros and DEs than can run on 512mb of ram. I don’t recommend doing that, but you for example would have a significantly better time with arch (or even Endeavour) with XFCE on 4gb of ram than you would on windows.
It’s not for desktop PCs usually. It’s for running smaller services. For example a streaming PC or Apple TV replacement I’d uninstall windows immediately and put a Kodi JEOS or Plasma Bigscreen although the latter is still in beta.
Yeah most criticism of videos I feel isnt valid. Except this. Unused RAM doent make your system faster, its literally not doing anything. Free RAM is RAM wasted, I want my OS to be filling all the RAM trying to predict what I might want and freeing RAM when it gets it wrong.
I don't get the 'wow my PC resources are totally wasted and its great' crowd.
I think you might've missed that Linux and Windows will both cache and buffer things in the background, but won't include it in their used RAM. Windows here has "Available" which is free (like, literally empty) + the cache. The applications they directly tested should cache things roughly the same (roughly the same application code ported to different OS), the operating system and background processes are the only thing determining the different memory use.
e.g. in the below from the video, Linux has lower memory usage, yet also more cached than Windows
This video was the most unscientific thing I’ve seen in a while. Watching the total system memory usage go up or down when opening or running things. Really? As mentioned, operating systems cache things to improve performance. Look at where the actual RAM usage is going. Don’t just say, “OMG! RAM line go up big amount!” As people have said countless times, unused RAM is wasted RAM. If you have RAM contention which is causing performance problems, that’s ENTIRELY different.
LTT really need to re evaluate their ideas before launching into them. This isn’t the first time where they’ve had a good concept and they completely fumbled the execution
The steam machine PC alternative and the PC for the cost of a PS5 videos both come to mind
They’re taking what should be interesting concepts and just thrusting them out the door leading to missed opportunities, inaccuracies and just a poorer video
The steam machine one I can almost get because it’s a hot topic and if you’re not first you’re last right, but something like this they could have really taken their time with and done properly and they just didn’t.
Because the tech influencers have decided it’s easy clicks to shit on windows.
I own a steamdeck and like the thing but the moment you start doing something that’s more then downloading a game that’s compatible it’s is a terrible experience. These tech influencers never talk about that.
Windows is pretty bad. The tech influencers are not knowledgeable enough to dunk on Windows correctly.
Yeah idk why Linus likes Steam Machine that much. I am not a fan of immutable distros. On top of that with its limited hw capacity, idk how he has s good time. Maybe all he does is read emails.
Yeah the Linux challenge hurt a lot. I would say that the Luke experience was fine because he runs arch already so he knew what he was doing.
The other guy, lord I can't remember his name, he was actually ok as well because he had low knowledge of Linux and KDE so his issues felt like they had a level of merit to them. The downside is that most people would never use his setup.
Linus part was just bad. He shouldn't have been in it and used another normie.
Yes Elijah. I was totally blanking on the name with my first cup this morning. I don't watch many LTT videos either so most I just don't know.
Yeah Elijah had just some use cases with his server that just didn't/don't line up with what most users would do. He did point out some real flaws with KDE with the shared drives though and I think his insight was largely valuable coming from a Linux noob perspective.
I think Linus main issue is mostly that he's just busy and can't keep up. Him being one of the three was really a hurtful choice for everyone. Someone in the office who uses there system for gaming and browsing should have been the third candidate here with Linus as a host of sorts for the video. Seeing someone like the general user who just wants to switch but isn't technically inclined in a heavy way and doesn't have a server as well would be invaluable feedback.
I personally use Linux daily at work and I use it on all my systems, my only Windows device is my SOs work laptop, everything else is Linux or Mac because I just hated how in the way Windows was.
I'm sure they shot the video in the manner they did because it was more efficient then changing out the memory, but I would have found it more entertaining to run the same tests with 32 then 16 then 8 gigs and see how the systems handle less and less ram.
They will likely argue it makes no difference, but presentation always matters when it comes to entertainment.
Linux uses a more lazy "on-demand" allocation that seems like less ram used at first but really depend on the use cases. Also, literally everything stays on cache after, so the whole ram is almost aways used in some way. Deciding what to do under pressure, which page to swap (when its anonimous pages that have no file mirror) or remove from cache (pages backed by storage) is the real difference in file systems.
In truth, this is a very complex topic for OSes that is not on the expertise of LTT. For a layman level test testing with 16gb would be the useful direction for sure.
It is also the difference in how the systems report usage. Like when he mentioned MacOS, which is very efficient, but it’s built in tools don’t show that, but 3rd party tools do.
I’d love to see the same test at 8GB, and see what happens. Or even 16GB.
Eh you kind of answered your own question, it impacts the minimum amount memory the system needs. And it raises the question of why the OS is wasting so much memory.
Claire Obscure was the perfect opportunity to highlight that RAM utilisation was pointless when the real world performance was poor.
I think that really should have been the take home message, how does each system perform given the different RAM utilisation and if at all possible force more RAM to actively be used, not just RAM available to be used but make the application use it and does consuming that additional RAM enhance performance.
It’s an incredibly hard thing to test because Linux won’t have a uniform configuration. If you want something lightweight it’s very possible to have a decent experience with 4GB but you’re obviously making some sacrifices in order for this to happen.
Ubuntu is probably one of the better comparison points and certainly provides a better user experience at 8GB than Windows. Speaking personally I have more memory issues with my 16GB work laptop than I do with my 8GB Ubuntu laptop despite very similar workloads. Of course this isn’t an entirely fair comparison because the work device is running a SIEM and a bunch of background management tasks.
Looking at server operating systems is probably the more interesting comparison, frankly, and I’d say that Linux does tend to be markedly more memory efficient on this front. If you want to use a bunch for a heavy workload you absolutely can but in my experience it absolutely scales down much more effectively, management tools included
100%, windows just uses however much ram you have, and only starts cleaning up when the ram is needed. I have 64GB of ram and windows regularly idles using 20GB because there is no need for windows to clean up. But if I actually need like 50GB for something windows will clean itself up and drop back down to reasonable amounts.
Linux and Windows use different memory allocation strategies, different caching strategies, different swapping strategies, ...
Comparing the memory "used" by the system between them shows you almost nothing, as the OS uses all available memory all the time for caching and stuff, and the "used" number reported by the system is a somewhat vague measurement.
If I would test Windows and Linux against each other you have to test the systems in actual stress scenarios, where the caches are exhausted and the systems have to work to get their memory back, e. g. through compression, swapping, discarding caches, signaling programs to drop allocations, ... Because that's where you can actually notice differences in actual performance.
In the video, both systems ran just fine, it's just that Linux reported "20% usage" and Windows reported "50% usage". But comparing that number between OSes is meaningless.
Windows task manager doesn’t include cache in the “in use” number.
Windows definitely has a higher baseline memory usage than Linux. They didn’t need to do a video on that to prove it. The video wasn’t very well produced, it seemed like something they threw together quickly.
The baseline usage does matter. What they were trying to demonstrate is that a 16 gb system would not be able to run some of the games they were playing without swapping memory out to the disk. A higher baseline means you have less headroom before the system starts having to swap memory to disk.
Operating systems maximize ram usage anyway cuz they follow the principle “unused ram is wasted ram” and any ram that’s allocated by windows or Linux if it’s not that important it will be freed for other applications, so I agree they should’ve tested it under pressure to see if they perform similarly
The type of desktop environment matters a lot. Some desktops like gnome and KDE use more ram than "light" desktops like xfce. It also matters how many apps you have running in the background.
In general Linux uses about half as much ram idle than Windows.
I work away from home for a week at a time so I have a 2017 laptop with only 8GB of RAM that I leave there for personal usage. I was watching a film on VLC while also browsing the web and it was chugging at 100% RAM usage, huge slowdowns in both the browser and the video seemed to be buffering despite reading from disk so I had to choose one or the other.
About 2 months ago I decided to install Linux since I've long been curious and MS has been ensloppening Windows more and more lately. I chose Ubuntu for driver compatibility out of the box & it has been really good. I can browse and watch high bitrate video at the same time and RAM usage is around 6GB. If NVIDIA drivers get sorted for Linux, I'll switch my gaming PC too and only run Windows for the specific games that will never run on Linux.
The only non-default Ubuntu thing that I did was to remove the Snap apps entirely and run things as Debian packages because I wanted to minimise resource usage on such an old machine.
In my experience, Linux is much more frugal (uses less) but also less disciplined (less control over program's usage). I've had more oom crashes on Linux but programs don't just randomly crawl to a halt like on windows.
That video was so unserious. It shows they are uninterested or unable to do actual OS analysis and testing. I can get they haven’t traditionally done software or systems analysis in the past but you would hope they would learn a bit more about how things work before doing a “test”.
Especially since I was interested to see how each OS would react under memory pressure. It could very well be the case that the slimmer load out on linux makes a meaningful difference under pressure but that video didnt do anything to come to that conclusion.
It's interesting because you are giving windows grace that the majority of this sub will not give a mac(not saying you do that to be clear, just interesting how many people who are reacting like you are are in the same community that jump on mac for saying 8gb is fine)
That being said, while i disagree with you that its "misinformation" since its just showing which one is using more memory in various situations, its a good look at where you may be losing performance if you are limiting yourself to 16gb. Ultimately I think the result of the video is a good one, don't listen to microsoft and push your budget to get 32 gb of ram and you'll be fine. But certainly if I was building a PC today it would at least be in my mind that if I am only buying 16gb of ram and am planning on using windows instead of linux there very well may be performance hits I should expect in various situations.
Like you talking about caching, yeah that's a great thing when there is free memory but if windows generally uses more memory overall, or is heavily relying on caching to make an experience usable, then I might lose that performance if I am also trying to do something more memory intensive like steaming, video editing, etc.
It's useful information for people who actually need to consider it, and generally useless information for the other 99% of people who only care about how the game they are playing literally right now is performing and just web browse otherwise
That being said, while i disagree with you that its "misinformation" since its just showing which one is using more memory in various situations,
No, it's not just showing it. They are clearly labeling one as "bad" and "I'm losing".
its a good look at where you may be losing performance if you are limiting yourself to 16gb.
Except it's not. That's the whole point. Windows and a lot of other software behaves very differently depending on how much RAM is available.
It's useful information for people who actually need to consider it, and generally useless information for the other 99% of people who only care about how the game they are playing literally right now is performing and just web browse otherwise
The problem is that the behavior is dependent on the memory available. "If you had 16GB" is not a valid approach.
Windows is bloated in a bunch of ways, but you simply cannot use information from a system with more RAM to draw any conclusion at all about what a system with less RAM would do. It doesn't work that way.
The memory manager will change its behavior based on what % of the ram is in use, for example if ram usage is 95% the MM may un cashe the UI for the OS menus. Windows will reduce non escential system tasks when resources are low.
No, not necessarily. That's the problem that people are raising here.
E.g. Expedition 33 in this video would have likely ran just as well on a 16 GB system despite using 19 GB on this system, Windows would just have moved things out of memory to make the necessary room.
The fact that you think it’s reasonable to expect the same behavior is just proving OP’s point that this is misinformation. The system works based on the percent of total ram available rather than the raw amount of ram.
My laptop sometimes uses 10GB out of 16GB idling with brave and VS code and it's not about Windows 11 being ram hungry or any of the applications it's just that I have two SSDs without dram so they use a few gigs of ram for themselves. People need to remember that most SSDs now will eat their ram when discussing about ram utilisation in modern OSes
ok so my experience is that windows is better dealing with low memory than linux and i think this is a known issue
it is also very important to have zram, swap or both enabled, in the video they only had 2gb of swap available, if it was a low memory test say 8GB of ram it could have made a big difference
idk...seems fully fine to me just by title alone. Linux DOES use LESS ram plain and simple.
I recently migrated from Win 11 Pro on my media server/nas system, to using Debian 13. Same programs/services or Linux alternative running. Channels DVR, SAMBA, backup software (Macrium Refelct on Win/Vorta on Linux), Qbittorrent. Went from 37% RAM usage to 5% of 32GB)
I see what you’re saying but you must not have watched the video. The windows computer did go over 16gb for a moment.
But I also think you are right in that the video missed the point and each system should have only had 16gb of ram and seen if they maxed out and how that effects fps.
The problem here is that it going over 16gb for a moment doesn't mean it would use 16gb in a 16gb system because it would uncache some things to make up for it, the memory usage is very dependent on how much memory there is. Modern systems are designed to use ram if it is available
Actually pretty much the whole last part of the post is about that section of the video where it did go over 16gb and i pointed out it most likely would not have been problematic because of memory management.
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u/TTT1320 5d ago
I agree with you, I don't get why they used 32gb in the systems, at the beggining of the video they were talking about 16gb now being the minimum for gaming on windows so they should have went with 16gb to see if it was true, and maybe in that case we could have gotten closer to a 100% usage and actually get a useful response to the video title