For those who couldn’t read the Linux GUI:
- Windows used 3.4 GB / 8GB
- Linux used 800 MB/ 8 GB
Oh yeah? But does linux allow you to install Ram Booster to instantly free up ram in one click? /s
I know this is !LinuxMemes but it’ll throw this here. Comparing memory usage like this is meaningless. My Linux desktop for example consumes around 20GB with nothing visibly started. ZFS would happily gobble up half of the system RAM for caching unless limited. And caching means speed. If your system isn’t caching a lot, it might be leaving speed on the table. Demand caching!
I don’t get why this is always mentioned. Windows caches too and uses up all free space for faster application startup, but just because it also does it doesn’t change the fact that it uses more ram for active processes while doing nothing. I remember Minecraft running a lot better on my old MacBook with just 4gb of ram as Ubuntu used less than Mac OS X and I could allocate more to the game, whether cacheing was enabled or not on those OSes was not relevant. This should not be relevant today as 32gb of ram can be purchased for less than 100 bucks but sadly is as Apple and other laptop manufacturers think selling soldered 8gb is ok for a base model in 2023 for a laptop costing more than 300 bucks
Regular linux users with >4GB RAM don’t need swap IMO. You can use swap for hybernation, but most people don’t even use that feature.
It’s always nice to have a failsafe if some process has a major memory leak. Otherwise if your memory fills up your system completely freezes with no way to recover.
This isn’t quite true. The system does recover. The mechanism doing the recovery is the kernel OOM killer which begins to shoot processes to free up RAM. Now whether or not the processes you care about survive or not and whether they lost any data you care about is a different question. 🤭 That’s a problem elegantly solved on Android by the introduction of its more complex lifecycle which provides data persistence guarantees.