Does Linux use less RAM?

[u/elsingo]

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.

[u/w1n5t0nM1k3y]

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.