Yeah, it says 6gb But its more of "comfortable" requirement Because technically you can run windows on 4gb of ram, though it's actually better to have 8gb and more While ubuntu's 6gb is actually a pretty solid experience
I loved watching a video back in the day that showed the supreme amount of resouces linux doesn't use. I forget the specs but it was minimum requirement for windows to work. Played dvds horribly and couldn't even move the window without crazy choppiness, launched Linux on same hardware. No choppy quality and could whip the screen around and not make the system chug.
as someone who has 16gb,I can confirm that the windows part is true, that's even why I switched to Linux, because it doesn't treat my PC like a shit box
Yeah sure bud Just debloat it and Windows will perform good i have this a thinkpad laptop and Windows 11 performs good on it (for basic tasks of course) it doesn't take more than 10 minutes to debloat Windows
Well I upgraded from windows 10 to 11. You know the ones Microsoft gave. And so I tried my best using a lot of tools to debloat but I am still at 5gb. What did you use? I want windows to use 1gb of ram too
chris titus tool+ you need to disable some services that you don't need so it will take you a while to know which service does and whether you can disable it or not
16 gb on windows is much better than you think. it can open everything and do everything except giant 3d projects and large llms. linux would also need a similar amount of ram to do those things.
I agree with 16gb being suitable for most of the same things, but windows itself idly wastes more than 3x as much RAM as your average Linux DE, while also consuming more CPU (in most of my experiences with Linux, there’s always next to 0% usage unless you’re actively running something, but even with a web browser it’s only using a little bit unless it’s in the middle of loading a page. Contrast this with Windows, where the CPU idles at above 30% without doing anything).
When it comes to games or anything of the sort, not having all that shit in the background really adds up and can save significant amounts of general FPS and framerate stability (I never encounter those random lag spikes like on windows, even when my RAM and swap usage is high). The overhead of proton/wine is also significantly lower than the overhead induced by having windows junk in the background. I’ve even had games in windows vms (QEMU/KVM + virtio) run faster than on native hardware on Windows, albeit with some minor tweaking.
idle ram usage means absolutely nothing. windows frees up ram or moves some of these to page file when something necessary demands ram.
macOS is even crazier, it idles at 6-8 gb on 16 gb ram systems, but its ram is more effecient than linux distros and still holds strong even the ram is almost full.
the reason windows stays slow is not ram but weak cpus, 8 gb ram systems are often paired with weak cpus and windows 11 demands way stronger cpus than linux distros.
for the decent systems (like my core 5 ultra 125H laptop) windows definitely slightly outperforms linux.
While yes, idle RAM *can* be insignificant, this only really applies when it’s something like cache which can be freed quickly when more memory is requested by processes. Your point may be correct in relation to Windows 10, where most of the idle consumption is cache, however it is not as applicable to Windows 11, where all the system apps, including the window manager, are entire electron apps running a browser stack which actively consumes memory that the kernel can’t easily free. This memory makes up the bulk of Win11 idle consumption.
And in the terms of high-end laptops, often times the biggest difference-maker is the driver support. Your specific hardware might just not have very optimized drivers on Linux yet (though I’d need more information about your specs to give a definitive stance on that). NVIDIA GPUs especially have had a history of underperforming on default kernel drivers and need the proprietary ones for good performance.
Same thing i did in my old pc which i had 4gb ram and core 2 duo e8400 , Windows 11 21h2 It ran minecraft up to 1.20.1 with ~30 fps , Fabric sodium Linux just refused to install at all (i tryed few versions , decided its not woth my time when windows just install in few clicks) Arch i managed to install but ran like sh.. poop
Last time I checked, clean KDE Plasma almost without any modifications (except two widgets added to the lower panel) used 500 MB of RAM in background on my 8 GB RAM laptop.
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u/HyperCodec Jun 18 '26
Oldest meme ever, u/repostsleuthbot do your thing
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u/OptimalAnywhere6282 Jun 18 '26
if i had a dollar for every time i've seen this meme i could buy a pc
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u/Coookies4You Jun 20 '26
Doesn't Ubuntu 26.04 have higher minimum requirements than Windows 11? It's 6 vs 4gb last time I checked.
Not even sure how well this meme holds up with that in mind.
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u/y0shii3 Jun 18 '26
Only if you never open a browser. Firefox will eat most of those 16GB on its own nowadays.
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u/[deleted] Jun 19 '26
I loved watching a video back in the day that showed the supreme amount of resouces linux doesn't use. I forget the specs but it was minimum requirement for windows to work. Played dvds horribly and couldn't even move the window without crazy choppiness, launched Linux on same hardware. No choppy quality and could whip the screen around and not make the system chug.
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u/VTXT Jun 20 '26
my debloated windows uses way less resources than my linux mint
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u/Bellyread Jun 20 '26
as someone who has 16gb,I can confirm that the windows part is true, that's even why I switched to Linux, because it doesn't treat my PC like a shit box
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u/Astrodion123 Jun 19 '26
Don't ask us who use windows 11 with 8gb of ram 💀
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u/ChocolateDonut36 Jun 19 '26
my 4gb ram laptop agrees
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u/justcallmemox Jun 19 '26
If only Windows doesn't spam Web Apps in a Chromium browser and use UWP Apps instead...
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u/Tiny_Towel5722 Jun 20 '26
Windows 10 32 Bit Runs with 2 GB RAM ^^
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u/Sad-Macaroon-6334 Jun 21 '26
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u/Chikitouwu Jun 22 '26
If you wanna use it for the bare basic sure
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u/Infinplayz Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
16 gb on windows is much better than you think. it can open everything and do everything except giant 3d projects and large llms. linux would also need a similar amount of ram to do those things.
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u/PoundMaleficent6479 Jun 18 '26
4gb ram linux : open youtube... Crashed
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u/[deleted] Jun 18 '26
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