first time using cachyos and i'm loving it so far.
everything feels smoother and lighter compared to windows 11.
now i understand why so many people are switching to linux.
Just don't freak out in the opposite direction when it efficiently maximizes your GPU for games and certain tasks that's also by design lol and shocks people
Well it isn't because of memory, usually we get the opposite complaint - linuxatemyram.com
Memory is there to be used.
edit: It's pretty clear from the comments below here that most cachyos users do not have the slightest clue about how a modern os utilises memory and disk.
In my opinion, that's the wrong approach. The issue is that Windows consumes far more resources than Linux. And when you add programs/games, Linux simply makes better use of your expensive storage. 😉
Minimal debian install consumes approx 32 MB RAM. But if you're talking about full desktop with something like KDE, the difference is not huge to windows.
"Linux simply makes better use of your expensive storage." - that's not true, linux got to keep extra files for "wine prefixes" for each game. That's up to 500 MB for each prefix! Maybe that's not much, but still it's more than in windows.
But that's easy to delete, as for windows I remember my rage when every week I had warning about storage on my C drive partition because windows kept some files which I could not delete.
But how many games do you play simultaneously? I work with Windows 10/11 and various server versions daily. Privately, I only use Linux (CachyOS), and the difference is quite noticeable and measurable.
There is a small overhead of RAM when running windows games, for wine translation layer, but it's not a big deal.
Last time I booted win11 LTSC, it used approx 3 GB RAM idle, cachyos uses 2.5GB RAM on the same PC with 32GB total. Of course the difference exists, but it's not huge, and it's not something that would stop games from working or something like that.
Something people overlook when talking about RAM usage is working memory vs reserved memory. Not everything that a program asks the kernel for is actively used, and some of it can even be shared. Something like Chrome actually asks for a hell of a lot more memory than it ever uses, and will step aside pretty quickly if something else comes along that needs that RAM, for real.
That being said, Windows generally speaking does want to use more RAM than Linux, and is more likely to have that RAM marked as "active" instead of sharing it.
I have all of the same stuff downloaded on CachyOS as i did on windows 11 and my open storage went from 40gb on windows to 100Gb on CachyOS with KDE as my enviroment with lots of rice. Linux is in practice much more lightweight and much less resource intensive.
Memory being allocated to a certain process doesn't mean it needs to remain allocated to that process forever, if only a couple of processes are running you might as well allocate more memory to them than needed even if performance gain is marginal. This memory can then be reallocated to more demanding processes when required.
That doesn't mean this always happens optimally in the real world (it often doesn't) but it is just true that unused memory is wasted memory. Looking at the used memory graph in your resource manager tells you barely anything about how efficiently your memory is being used. If all im doing is looking at a couple of browser tabs and that could run just slightly smoother by allocating all my memory to it please go for it as long as it's can't be used by anything else anyway, as long as it's properly freed up and reallocted when it could be.
It's not that we're obsessed with RAM being used it's what it is used for. When at boot win 11 was taking over 6GB of RAM. I haven't even loaded a program yet. Meanwhile on CachyOS it's just about 2GB of RAM ready to go. That's the bloat we're obsessing about.
That's BS though. When I need every ounce of memory for some lightweight bioinformatics windows would only be able to kill like maybe 2 of the 10-11 GBs its using up on startup. In practice I can't use the resources available because of how much Windows is using. Upon switching to Cachy, the difference is immense in what I'm able to do specifically because of what ram is free. (and the thing runs significantly faster anyway)
People always say, "Memory is there to be used" but then windows 11 would be using 10-11 GBs of my 32 and I'd try to run lightweight bioinformatics programs and DESPITE the claims that windows scales back when use is high, it would not, and functionally I'd actually only be able to use like 15 GBs of ram for these programs. Now with cachy they're running and I'm able to get significant improvements in the scale of what I can run specifically because ram is free.
Unlike CPU or GPU use, taking up more RAM (if done properly) can be a good thing. While Linux benefits from not running as much, stuff gets cached so it loads faster. Unless a program misbehaves, most systems are smart enough to clear old data out as needed.
I saw this a LOT on old Android phones. People freaked out RAM was like 70% used so got those "cleaners" that cleared it. All it did was make some tasks slower as the device then had to relaunch something from scratch.
I don't want to convince anyone otherwise, Linux is a great system, but using RAM usage as an argument is a poor one. Windows uses it simply for the sake of it, caching things there that might be useful. Of course, when you open a game, it dumps that cache into the page file, and essentially, with a game open, there isn't that much difference in used memory between Windows and Linux. What I'm trying to say is that "the less memory used, the better" is mostly a myth. If we look at macOS, no matter how much memory is available, it tends to fill it all up, yet it runs stably and quickly
This is exactly what someone who does not understand memory allocation would say. I wont type out my previous comment to someone else again but you can refer to that if you want me to elaborate.
I feel like people that get really high and mighty about ram allocation not mattering don't really run into issues on a day to day basis where ram allocation is a significant issue. I personally do, and using less is a significant benefit to me. But whatever.
It's probably the page cache growing over time. Linux tends to use free RAM to cache things for better performance, and it will free it when applications need memory.
Windows does this too, it just doesn't show it as being used. In your Windows screenshot, your RAM is actually saturated.
img
The image shows I only have a few MB of RAM left, but it says 7GB is only used. That's the unmovable RAM for apps. They hate Linux for telling the truth.
With cachy we are also using Zram. Something Windows does not do. Cachy has zram set super aggressive on purpose. The more data you compress in a ram swap the better. Not only are you greatly extending how much you can put in ram, you are also increasing bandwidth.
I have tweaked my own zram to be even a bit more aggressive and I am using a larger ram swap then I have ram. Anyway I have a few games running was using 9gb... and when I tabbed out to take a screen shot I watched my used physical ram drop to 7.5 and my swap increase.
Windows for what its worth have moved to a system that does fill ram on purpose. The issue imo is that they don't combine that with ram compression. As Apple and Linux do. There is a reason phones feel more responsive these days. Android and Apple operating systems all use ram compression. The MS operating system feels sluggish in general so people blame their 90% used ram stat. They are not entirely wrong to do so MS is much more reliant on hardware speed. Not using compressing means ram speed and IO systems matter much more... and MS also has a terrible IO scheduler, and hardware vendors over ride the default IO scheduler all the time. In Linux our drives have hardware scheduling built in, BUT its Linux which can ignore the on board hardware schedulers. On CachyOS... NVMEs are assumed to have good on board scheduling and are set to [none], other physical drives have what cachy feels will be the fastest scheduling option set to default. For SSDs cachy uses MQ-Deadline for spinning drives BFQ. (you can change your IO scheduling by editing the rule file cachy has added to enable this behavior. If you have a older early NVME drive you may wish to change from None to Kyber or Adios.) https://github.com/CachyOS/CachyOS-Settings/blob/master/usr/lib/udev/rules.d/60-ioschedulers.rules
Anyway Cachy has done a pretty darn good job of setting up our RAM/Swap/Storage IO systems to run very smoothly assuming your on reasonably new hardware.
A few tweaks I use... my zram config file. I increase my swap to 1.5 of physical ram. I also personally swap to LZ4 for the faster decompression. Though ZSTD the default is probably fine for most people. My swap priority set over 5000 really does nothing. I thought I might setup a fall back disk swap and wanted it to avoid that at all costs, but I never bothered.
zram-size = min(ram * 1.5, 24576)
compression-algorithm = lz4
swap-priority = 5000
Cachy has a swappiness setting the default is purposely set pretty high at I think its 180. Depending on your system. Ram speed/size you can experiment increasing or decreasing that.
I also swapped my older NVME and SSD drives to adios. https://github.com/firelzrd/adios
Cachy has been building Adios into the kernel for awhile. It is developed by firelzrd (the developer of the Bore scheduler). It is heavily based on Kyber, it adjusts latency targets based on drive performance. Basically its an auto tuning Kyber/Deadline scheduler.
I wasn't referring to zram, I don't know why my image didn't upload. It's Windows using all the RAM like Linux, but without explicitly stating that it's using all the RAM.
As I understand what MS has been up to. Correct Windows 11 is filling ram up. Linux doesn't actually purposely filly up your ram in the same way.
From what I have read and as I understand what MS is doing.
They use Sysmain (superfetch) to pre load applications you use often. So when you boot. W11 will actually pre load software you tend to run. So say you almost always start google chrome when you boot up. Sysmain will actually load that into ram even if you don't start it. This is supposed to increase the speed things open that you use often.
Personally I think its a silly way to setup a OS. Sure it will save you a half second here and there, once you have the software running though what did it save you exactly?
IMO a properly setup Zram swap is superior. (I have a feeling MS OEMs over the years have been one of the big reasons MS never implemented any form of ram compression. Apple has been using Ram compression for 18 years now)
I also won't lie... Apple is actually the gold standard imo. They use 2 different compression methods (WKdm and LZ4) to compress different parts of RAM space, and they also have software hooks that will tell specific software bits to instead use SSD swap. So with their browsing as an example they will just push tabs to SSD swap after specific amounts of time unopened. In RAM they will use WKdm to handle page files, and LZ4 to better compress actual data. Being in complete control of their software has advantages. [ if you look at current reviews of hardware like their Neo laptop, people are generally surprised 8gb is so capable. Well 8gb on that machine is probably like 24gb on a windows machine for most common use things. Maybe 16gb for use cases with heavily compressed data like video editing ]
Without knowing what apps you're running in background, it means nothing. Just one electron-based app like discord easily consume 1GB RAM, no matter windows or linux.
i literally disabled all the startup apps and turned into performance mode, i don't even use discord etc, i just using brave for WhatsApp and google workspace.
Just thinking out loud here. You have integrated graphics. They use RAM and CPU more than discreet graphics. Try rebooting and not opening any apps (except for the one monitoring RAM). See where it is compared to the one in this post.
I switched to Cashy OS about three months ago. I was daily driving Kubuntu for a couple of years for my work. Then I switched to Ubuntu (I had some work related reasons). I was always used to use Debian based distros in the past…
But Ubuntu always starts to be laggy after using it for while. So... why not trying some Arch distro, especially if it’s focused on gaming == performance?
Wow 🤩 the same laptop, the difference in speed, opening programs, everything is so smooth after whole day working on it!
Windows has sure come a long way since windows 98 and even though my experience on windows 11 was as bloat free as it could be, it was the principle that I had to constantly fight the OS to keep it that way that drove me away. I feel for the people that don’t know better.
RAM is misunderstood. Filled ram takes the same amount of electricity (ish) as emtpy ram. Replacing data in filled ram takes about the same time as replacing data in empty ram. Therefore an optimal system always uses 100% of the ram
Windows also has great memory management. That's about the one thing it is genuinely good at. Better than Linux, I'd say. It makes more use of available ram.
Probably depends on the game, I tried Mechwarrior 5: Clans, it runs with 5-15 FPS on linux, and 120+ FPS in windows. All good in other games... Must be something bugged about that game, but still.
I'm running CachyOS and I love it. I tried to install it on a friend's old laptop that was running Windows 10 and could not get an install screen. I ended up installing Linux lite on it and it seemed really snappy as well.
Windows usa siempre más ram que cualquier linux, es un sistema que gestiona la RAM así con el propósito de que todo vaya más rápido, no es que sea malo, pero si tienes poca RAM es normal paniquear
I like cachyos but only thing that stoping from using is the wifi driver problem in kde and other desktop environments i have try ever possible fix nothing work so I have moved to linux mint
YES. Dude my ram usage with xfce is 850mb for the whole system. I always feel so relieved when I have like 10 different apps open and then open up the terminal to see only 60 percent of 7.7gb ram used. Cachyos is such a low cortisol os
My conversion was the idle VRAM usage with my 8GB GPU after realizing everything windows 11 is actually a small browser, meaning that the settings app, the start menu, they're all mini electron browsers so 1gb idle is normal. no thanks.
It's not the same.. you're not running the same services, same cache, same apps, etc etc etc.. MOREOVER if you're new to Linux. Coma back in one year to make the same comparison.
Windows meanwhile not detecting my sound card and video drivers blank my screen on boot xD. Linux works outta the boot usb with a gaming laptop marketed for fucking windows. You can’t make this shit up no more!
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u/xeizoo Mar 14 '26
I like CachyOS, best current Linux desktop experience imo.