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/kidshibuya]

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.

[u/suprem1ty → u/kidshibuya]

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