• shalafi@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    Used to build “little old lady” computers for neighbors and such. Say someone gave me their shit PC to fix. Fine. Throw in whatever extra hardware I had, clean it up, new thermal paste and whatnot, small SSD, Linux Lite, Chrome, “Here’s how you get email and internet.” Never once heard from them again.

    Here’s the secret sauce; I never once mentioned “linux” or even began explaining what I had done. No need to talk OS, it was “windows” to them! I was there to fix computers, not evangelize.

  • FishFace@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    The RAM impact of the OS is nothing compared to that of modern apps which are all browser-based.

    • InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      True, but if you are starved for ram, then minimizing the OS use gives more for the rest of the bloated apps you cannot control.

      • FishFace@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        Or you could focus that energy on cleaning out your browser tabs/closing other applications every once in a while and you’d have a better effect :P

        This laptop has 32GB of RAM and regularly runs dry due to running both Chrome and Firefox, VScode, Zoom and whatever other random crap. And tuning systemd-oomd to walk the line between “Using 16GB of RAM will instantly kill the entire desktop shell” and “Once you’ve used all 32GB the kernel OOM killer will free something up in 3-5 business decades” is painful too.

  • sanderium@lemmy.zip
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    5 days ago

    The fact that one can use a wm/compositor to make the desktop lighter is sick. I was using 350MB idle with Alpine + River, it is so damn snappy.

    I came to Linux for freedom and stayed for the performance.

  • mmmm@sopuli.xyz
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    5 days ago

    Believe it or not due to third world issues I went with all of uni and part of my graduated life (2008-2016/17) with a crappy Intel Pavilion DV2000 which had Core2Duo and 3GB on RAM. With Gentoo. It went just fine for most daily stuff and some of my work as a graphic designer.

  • Underwire@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    I was running Plex, Jellyfin, Nginx, rtorrent with 3k torrents and few other containers and they were running on a very old machine with 4GB of RAM and only 2GB were really used.

    • Ann Archy@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      Well sure, but did you also run a hundred unterminable processes that analyzed your behavioral patterns in real time and fed that information into a surveillance pipeline directly hooked into Microsoft data centers?

      Because if not, then what are you even doing with your life?

  • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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    5 days ago

    I like that this is both true and false.

    The memory management of an OS is almost always entirely dependent on what it’s doing or designed to do. Linux and Windows are able to do similar things, but are rarely tasked with the same workloads.

    Windows desktop (aka, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, 11) are designed to be more pretty and run desktops that the user will see/interact with, etc. I will say that Microsoft knows their audience and the windows prefetch stuff is quite good, all things considered…

    Windows server on the other hand… Until recently, it still shipped with IE11 as the only browser. Of course as soon as you started it, the whole system would complain and tell you to go download edge… Server is a beast unto itself.

    Additionally, as an IT support person, I always prefer people have more RAM than they need, rather than less. Getting that figure just right is nigh impossible. And if you have the RAM, you should use it, right? Because otherwise, why would you have it? It becomes a waste of money.

    Prefetch and memory caching is a good use of memory, and a big reason why Windows has very little memory actually “free” at any given time… I’ll note, I’m mentioning free memory, not available memory.

    It’s a fascinating topic, honestly.

    With all that being said, I’m not saying that Windows is actually better in any way. My entire point is that there’s merit to the different methodologies of the different operating systems. They’re built differently and that is a good thing.

    • Ann Archy@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      Great points! Yet, Linux = greased lightning, Windows = sludge. So your great points can go suck off a polar bear.

      • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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        4 days ago

        My main issue with Linux is that it doesn’t reserve any CPU time for itself. Push it to 100% usage and the mouse cursor lags all over the place. I think this a Wayland thing.

    • LoreSoong@startrek.website
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      5 days ago

      Braindead responses and honestly probably just bait anyone passing through, ignore this fool. Ubuntu base install(gnome), in my experience uses less than 2gb of ram at idle. (Even less when using xfce or lxqt) Dummy added bloat to his system and then came on here to bitch about nothing. either that or hes a bot, troll or both.

      • kbotc@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        It’s still just an OS. The ol’ dentries/pagecache/inodes caching can bloat your RAM usage out, especially in combination with the default for swappiness and vfs_pressure, not to mention the kernel slab. sk_buff is quite untunable depending on the particular kernel. That on top of any badly behaved applications that request transparent huge pages but don’t properly defragment their space you can end up with fairly huge bloat, especially if the app you are using forks and changes memory often. It’s hard to just “Linux uses no memory and that’s that!” When it gives you a mile of rope to hang yourself with.

  • ftbd@feddit.org
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    5 days ago

    The only RAM issue I ever had was running nixos-rebuild on a RPi with 1G RAM.

    • Experienced users are known for being able to customize their install to be lightweight enough to function with modern tasks on old hardware. I myself have an install on an old 4gb MacBook Air that runs just as well as my server with 64 gb of RAM for the task load that I’ve deployed on it.

      4gigs is a perfectly reasonable amount of RAM for word processing, web browsing, retro gaming, basic development (if you’ve got another rig to deploy compilations to), and a whole host of other applications.

    • ftbd@feddit.org
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      5 days ago

      Really depends on the use case. If you’re only running a few lightweight containers on a headless machine, 4G is more than you’ll ever need.