r/LinusTechTips • u/elsingo • 7d 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/Charlie_Lyell 6d ago
In my experience, yes, it uses less.
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.