A near-frontier quality AI told me using IoT would free up about 1-2gb of ram compared to Windows 11.

Oh, well as long as it was a high quality hallucination machine that told you that.

Based on my usage of Linux, Windows 10 and Windows 11, I have no doubt that Windows 11 uses at least 1-2gb more of ram. It runs like crap on older PCs while Windows 10 runs okay. That's the true test.

I've dealt with AI and know the history with hallucinations. Today Hallucinations are more of an issue when it's a controversial topic (politics, religion, or issues the political influencers have taken control of in the media).

They're fed training data pushing a narrative preferred by the AI developers, who leave out the contradictory info. It's a lot like social media moderation. Ultimately, there's a group of individuals at the company who think a certain way and think the rest of the world should think like them too. It's more of an issue after the R&D model has been turned into a commercial variant at the company by the engineers there and it's out of the hands of the Ph.Ds who originally made it.

As soon as you prompt a basically decent AI to not rely on a training data or a superficial web scrape, and it goes looking for contradictory info, then it re-thinks what it told you. This is more of an issue with the commercial corporate subscription AIs and the older small LLMs from years ago that didn't have web scraping capability. Things have definitely changed in the last year or two where the dense models with web scraping capability are concerned. At least, if you go with the uncensored or ablitterated "Thinking" versions of them available on the Huggingface site, or you use a third party service to access a large open weights model that's been made uncensored by whoever maintains it.

Yeah seriously, why is this even a discussion. 32GB is the bare minimum acceptable these days, regardless of which desktop OS you're using.

What? I do not understand...

Ai users? Using iot???

I do not see any relevance, sorry.

I agree fully. But in this post's comments people don't seem to understand how RAM use works.

It should be used... It is good... Not using it is bad!

All three of my PCs running Linux have 16GB in them. Never run out of RAM.

It's relevant. To sum it up, this much smarter-than-average part of the PC user base routinely uses Linux rather than Windows 11. A part of the user base that is far more familiar with relative performance of both on the same hardware.

Fuck yeah. All these years we've complained that Windows was getting so insanely bloated and the system requirements were going crazy, and finally they decided to put in the time and effort to really optimize it so it runs on lighter setups.

Who knew it would be so easy as just removing the recommended specs entirely!

But posting screenshots of your task manager tells us nothing. If it uses 30% of your RAM at start time, that's fine. Or not. Can't really tell.

Man if only there was some type of metric that showed available memory instead of cached

Actually I think you meant hard allocation in which case it can actually be bloated applications that request too much preallocation from the OS (source: every Java jar ever).

Mint cinnamon runs fast as hell on my xps 13 with an 1135g7 and 8gb. Like faster than my Flow z13 395+ with 64gb. It's a serious software issue.

What a fucking garbage can company.

So you're saying that upgrading my tower to 128 GB was overkill? I suppose I could sell one of the ram sets now for probably double what I paid for all 4 sticks in 2023

Up to you, but unless you're doing something that needs 128GB, 64GB is already overkill.

If your processes require RAM, it’s fine to use it. Windows obviously has many processes like that and reserves lots of RAM.

A Linux system can also have RAM-heavy processes if you choose to install and run them. In that case, a high RAM usage indicates that these processes are functioning correctly. Conversely, very low RAM usage suggests that the system is running as intended, assuming you haven’t installed unnecessary applications.

While RAM usage numbers can tell you something about installed and running processes, they don’t necessarily tell much about system performance. High or low values alone don’t definitively tell you whether the system is running well or poorly.

Had me in the first half. As if that clusterfuck fascist OS would run efficient on 8GB

It's recommended to have 32gb of ram just for windows? Is that actually true?

People run Linux with full plasma desktop with like 8 gb ram. It's the browser that eats up several gb from that, not the desktop. Desktop alone is probably 4 gb max.

But sure, depending on what else you run, you want more memory. But if windows recommends 32 gb just to run the system, that's crazy.

I guess I’ve been living in lala land or something because I’ve been perfectly happy with half of that.

Pretty privileged

Honestly, the only reason we really needed that much ram to begin with was because no one optimized anything.

I certainly won’t excuse Microsoft here, but if the RAM shortages cause developers to reevaluate their nonfunctional requirements, that will be a small victory.

According to the fine article, Microsoft's recommendation for gaming PCs was that "32GB is ideal for serious players who run the most demanding titles or use heavy mods”.

So, no.

Instead of that we got computer leasing agreements

And even with 4GB Linux itself is not the problem. It's the apps. So many Electron apps that use so much memory because they're running in Chromium instances.

Well what games do you play?

I play games at 4k and I have yet to come across one where 32 gigs wasn’t more than enough. Even more computer heavy games like Satisfactory.

Edit: I realize I should have specified that my 16 gig machines are not gaming machines.

Windows doesn't struggle with 16GB at all unless you're doing something that obviously needs as much memory as you can give it, like anything made by Adobe.

For 9/10 users 16GB is plenty, even with common apps that hoard it like it's some sort of hard drug (Chrome).

I’m sitting at 22 gigs used with a browser, teams, and an IDE. The browser is taking about 1.6, the IDE as well. Teams is taking 2. Then there’s a bunch of little web views and other BS that windows has spawned gobbling up it all.

Ah yes, the same crap about what's being "used" without the entire system context being considered. Because as we all know, simple numbers tell the entire story all by themselves.

The system and apps will use what's available if you have it. That's what you want, unused RAM is wasted RAM, and there is zero reason not to use resources that are readily available. The system automatically caches and preloads things like files and applications you tend to use at certain times of the day so they load faster when you do access them. This is used memory, but it is also readily available for literally anything else.

All of those apps know you have plenty more memory readily available if they want it, so they will fill to use whatever they want and won't attempt to do more than basic memory management. Once the active resource usage fills, both apps and the system itself will begin more aggressive memory management. Until then, there's no reason to.

Remove RAM until you have 16GB, run those exact same things and you will almost certainly see under 16GB of usage.