I don't understand why my PC is so slow

As someone who was forced to start using Windows again after ten years after ten years of exclusively running Linux: Why is it like this? Everything is so crappy and slow!

windows 11 straight up requires 16gb of ram now.

it idles at almost 8 (!!!) fucking gigabytes for some stupid reason.

Tbh you can probably make a Linux install act like windows if you wanted. So that's another point in favour of switching for people who are undecided. It can be as slow and bloated as your windows install if you want it.

My hope is that with the end of Windows 10 coming up, laptops with 7th generation CPUs will become really cheap, such as ThinkPad P51 and P71. They are a decent budget choice < 1k USD/EUR already, but might drop way under 500 with top specs.

It's not like they are useless, but the market for Linux users should be satiated quickly once a selling panic sets in.

For most use cases, including backend development, they'll be good enough for many years to come. tbh, I'm still happy with my i5-2500 from 2011 and 16 GB RAM, and that is with local DB, application server, IDE and everything running locally.

I am working to decommission a windows server, which is currently using 500gb ram, and i have moved all functions to a different application, same purpose and very similar underlying methodology... 32gb of ram on linux. it's crazy how much bloat windows admins are willing to accept.

I have a laptop with 4gb ram that i've been using kde plasma on and fairly frequently it just freezes or I have to restart because I had like 6 tabs open in firefox

Although I don't remember having that problem as much when I was on xfce, but I also might not have been using it as heavily then

I've never had a similar problem with chrome on chromeos with the same amount of ram, I think chrome+chromeos might be more aggressive with unloading tabs

Sometimes it does actually kill firefox but sometimes it just becomes very slow (1-2 seconds per frame) or freezes entirely for several minutes when out of memory. Might be just because the swap is really slow, but there's just 2gb of that, why would it freeze for several minutes? (One time this was happening was when I was trying to compile llvm on two threads, I ended up having to temporarily kill the desktop environment to save ram)

I dual boot. It's so painful to go back to windows but some work related software doesn't run at all in Wine. Perhaps I should VM W10 or W11.

Part of growing up dirt-poor is making use of any hardware possible. I excel so much at that skill now thanks to all the open source projects out there (the WM, DEs, distributions, TUIs, ...). I can really squeeze a lot from a tiny host & having this mentality as a dev now is some times appreciated 😄.

Not if you have Firefox open. Three YouTube tabs and my 4GB Pi5 is swapping so hard it takes forever to move the mouse anywhere.

Can I run WoW on Linux?

Well, Windows as such don't need more RAM as some Linux distros, What is wasting the most RAM is all the telemetries, services not needed, trials, adware and other crap which Windows has by default when you buy it with a new PC. Windows need average users because of this capables to fix it, not needed in Linux. That is the difference. A gutted Windows is pretty fast, without all the trash which is loaded on boot. Eg,only diseable the hybernation service reduce a big part of the RAM, because it make duplicates of all open apps as temporary files, to load these on the next startup. same with the index service to find files somewhat faster, which waste memory to write any change to the index, not really needed in mdern PC and less with an SSD. Only diseabling this 2 services can increase the speed and respond more than 50%.

But the normal user don't do it and only claimes that Windows becomes slower and slower, because it is more and more filled with temp and trash files. That is the problem with Windows, because MS sells you a car, but by default with a huge caravan which you don't need, that must tow.