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(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2025
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Linux aint perfect either. Look at the memory usage of most modern "fully featured" distros. They're using damn near as much at idle as windows is. Same thing going back 10 years in time.
The key is with windows you get one windows, and maybe some tweaks. With linux you could go with a hyper minimal DE with not much in the way of shiny features and go a whole lot further.
I've never seen a distro take more than 2gb RAM ootb (ubuntu gnome and kde are probably the "heavy" contenders), excluding precached files. In either case, Windows or Linux, you lose big time the moment you launch a web browser.
The fresh install of Manjaro KDE on my laptop is using 2.6gb on a fresh boot right out of the box.
I forget what distro it was (maybe neon?) that was using like 3.X gigs of ram on a fresh install. That was the point that I realized this wasn't the Linux of old.
For shits and giggles I just tested out Ubuntu 25.04 and it's only 1.3 gigs with it's stock Ubuntuified de.
For as much shit as Ubuntu gets it's really not that bad compared to some of the others.
It probably was Neon. I switched recently and (for me) it's more resource hungry than Kubuntu, even.
Not prefect, but c'mon. You can run Linux+GUI in a potato, but even KDE Plasma is not nearly close to Windows in RAM/CPU usage (excepting misconfigurations of baloo).
Linux also uses a lot of ram for disk caching, it's flagged as a form of available memory so there's no performance overheard for this.
Disk caching is almost never included in the ram usage numbers. Or if it is it's specified as caching, but still not factored into the number.
Huh TIL, had a look through my system and it sits at about ~5GB not including disk cache. Been on Fedora KDE since 39 and have put it through its paces so I'm pretty happy with that
I would've reformatted windows twice in that time because of bloat accumulation, and like you said there's always room for improvement with hyper minimalist packages.
God I love Linux.
I switched to KDE Neon lately and holy fuck does it chug down my battery in a few hours time (though most of the consumption is from Firefox so can't blame it completely on the distro)