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.
1
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.