As someone who deals with various windows bullshit on the daily, 8gb for win11 is fine assuming you don't use any applications. If you want to actually use the machine, 16gb is the absolute minimum

Why would they knowingly push for better but unnecessary hardware? What do they gain from people buying more RAM than necessary to run Windows?

Edit: wait, they also sell laptops. Duh.

Kids, learn from my mistakes, read article first, comment second.

Honestly some of my biggest fights are with browsers being ram hogs and edgewebview2 constantly shitting the bed causing excessive ram utilisation and various crashes to basic office applications

they also provide the os on most systems sold by everyone else, too.

Don't worry, soon they will announce that 4GB will probably be fine too, once they discover they need even more RAM for their AI slop farms.

next they'll say any ol' hdd is fine, too.

(they are not)

if you ever have to use win11 on a laptop with 4 or 8gb ram and a 2.5in hdd, you'll be inventing new swear words.

I guess maybe 8GB is fine if all you do is have a browser open with some tabs.. W11 is not RAM friendly.

How about 2?

Nothing. It's not unnecessary. It's very necessary, especially Windows. They're just shifting their perspective because RAM has gotten so wildly expensive.

Windows 10 had a minimum requirement of 2GB RAM, with 4GB recommended for a comfortable experience. Windows 11 bumped that up and then kept needing more as the OS got heavier with every update cycle.

...to 4 GB...

Windows 11 has a minimum requirement of 4 GB.

Maybe it is. I don't know. But I've read a lot of comments suggesting that Windows burns RAM harder than MacOS and Linux.

I'm so glad my work is buying laptops with 32GB of RAM. Finally, we're in the future. (I think true nerds need more, but these are office people using Word and Outlook. It's glorious.)

I hope they have to rebase their os to win 7 due to ram prices

Linux? Depending on the distro, ram usage is a joke.
Got a rpi and a NUC running Debian as a server (so without running the display environment constantly) and the use ~ 500-800mb ram.
With a DE, they need like 1-1.2gigs.

The nuc is particularly funny since it hosts 2 Nextcloud instances, 2 websites and a qwen3 embedding model and sits at ~ 6gb ram.

I'd say 8G is fine until you open a browser.

Why the fuck does the OS need so much memory?

I thought 32GB was a minimum for the last PC I built 8 years ago.

Mine doesn't, maybe you are using the wrong one?

This was supposed to be a shamless Linux plug, but in order to be useful for some people I'd recommend debloating your Windows installation. I've had good experience with Raphire's debloater.

I use Linux at home too, but windows at work

M after ricing arch into some ungodly aberration that was never meant to exist in this world.

and every application today is a browser.

This is irrelevant for work, where you need a web browser and work applications (which are probably more web browsers). My work laptop is currently sitting on 33G used out of 64G.

1000% bs. My work pc has 8gb of ram and im always 100%. I hardly get anything done quickly if I open teams which I have to.

"fine" depends on what you're doing. web browsing? youtube? maybe, just dont open more than 5 tabs. doing literally anything else? no. get 12 gb or 16 gb ram.

My rule was 32gb at least. And that was for. At least 10 years

Yeah and if you'd use Linux your work laptop would be sitting at like 6gb, if you'd just browse the web and edit text documents.

The only time I ever need more than 10 gigs on my main machine is when I play games. Windows and Linux aren't even close in normal use cases.

You can even try it yourself, grab yourself a 10 year old laptop and install any Linux distro on it, it will feel like a new machine.

I've used Windows 10 with 4GB. It's not a comfortable experience. Neither is Windows 11 with 8GB.

About halfway through the lifecycle for Windows 10, HDD performance became pure garbage and I genuinely do not know how/why they did that. Something about how they were handling indexing or read operations at idle meant pinning the disk at 100% usage almost all the time and the only solve was an SSD. I hate that shit so much.

Yeah and if you’d use Linux your work laptop

which I do so maybe remove your head from wherever it's stuck and rethink.

Memory use of applications is not especially different between operating systems (assuming no compression). The hand the OS has in memory usage is mainly its own memory usage, but that is dwarfed by application usage. In the case of an application like, say, Firefox, its core is written in languages like C++ with explicit memory management. The same code runs on both platforms, so when you open a webpage, the same data structures are needed in the same quantities. CPU architecture can change how much memory a structure needs, but OS doesn't. So the application requests essentially the same number of bytes from the operating system, and the OS reserves that many bytes for the use of the application.

You can get into more detail than this, resulting in some small differences, but given that you started with a hilariously wrong assumption I don't think there's any need.

Ok Mr grumpy

Spyware

running Debian as a server (so without running the display environment constantly)

Wait, is this a Debian-exclusive feature?

Guess I need to take a second stab at setting up my own server

Yeah no. I'm at 32 and task manager says that 28+GiB are being used on idle. The sum of everything that appears on task manager doesn't reach 2GiB.

And it's not "the OS is using it because you aren't", because if I do anything demanding, the OS won't give me back that RAM, it'll use the swap instead.

I have 16gb and more than 15 tabs causes my computer to studder.

Yes you can disable the DE on Debian and probably on other distros too.

I "disable" it the wrong way, since I want to have it after a reboot, for diagnostics, I just shut it off via systemctl
For gnome it should be:
Systemctl stop gdm3

But you can also configure it to always start headless.
And if you need it you can launch it again from the shell.

I had to uninstall chrome and switch to edge on my work laptop just to make it usable. 8 is barely enough, if you’re very careful

Wait, is this a Debian-exclusive feature?

it's not an exclusive feature, as you can you can do this on most if not all distros. it's just that Debian is better suited to server (this is a bit objective) since the packages are less likely to change and break on you (so reliability and stability)

I mean maybe, if you aren't running any other softare at all and just staring at your desktop.

Okay but with 16 gig you have so much room for Activities!

I mean, as long as you pair it with an optane cache drive it should be fine

optane was a horrible and ineffective 'solution' to windows and application bloat.

I think the product was good. But it was too little too late, since nand SSD pricing had already begun to drop. If it had a higher capacity, or lower pricing, or was released sooner it would have been a hit.

I still use one for an os drive in my nas.

the one i still have just an ssd boot for a dietpi (debian mini server), separated from its hdd which is just file storage. as a regular ssd, the modules are 'ok'. a bit slow--and of course very small, but higher endurance. i should never have to worry about it running out of writes in that little mini-server.

But you'll definitely want OneDrive, Teams, Edge, Chrome, Adobe and your totally necessary "anti-virus" to run in the background 24/7 right?

That is not how this works. The system isn't using all that, I can guarantee that. Even launching a terminal (or any app) as hidden will not make it and its usage appear in taskmgr - I once unknowingly managed to exhaust my 64GB by launching hundreds of terminal sessions withoutever killing them. Try something like sysinternals process manager to see what's actually going on.

You have other problems beyond windows. My laptop has 32gb and it uses like 6.5gb with nothing open on the desktop.

You can guarantee it? Are you a Microsoft Windows developer? In that case, I'd like to fill in a bug report.

When I turn my machine on, without me doing anything at all, task manager would display >20GiB used. I don't have many applications to run at startup. At most iCUE (Corsair keyboard drivers). I don't think iCUE is using 20GiB if RAM.

Then, I open 2-3 vscode instances. Each instance launches its own rust-analyzer, since I'm looking at 3 rust projects simultaneously.

Each rust-analyzer instance uses ~3GiB of RAM.

That is enough to reach 100% ram usage and the computer becomes noticeably slower, even if CPU usage is at 7%.

Tell me, Microsoft Windows developer. Why does my machine grind to a halt when I use ~10GiB of RAM, if win11 says that the recommended amount is 16GiB and I have 32? 10+16 = 26. I should have a minimum of 6GiB left. The math ain't mathing.

I would advise against doing your own math

Not only are you a Microsoft developer. Are you also a maths PhD? I thought I was using maths of a level I'm comfortable with. Mainly addition, abstraction, and multiplication if real numbers.

Perhaps I've committed a grave mistake. Please show me where my mistake is.