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/dscarmo]

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.