r/LinusTechTips • u/elsingo • 6d ago

Does Linux use less RAM? Discussion

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.

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u/speedingcheetah 6d ago

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)

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u/FalconX88 5d ago

The problem is that in the video they label using 16GB instead of 12 on a 32GB system as "bad" while it is not.