Linux aint perfect either. Look at the memory usage of most modern “fully featured” distros. They’re using damn near as much at idle as windows is. Same thing going back 10 years in time.
The key is with windows you get one windows, and maybe some tweaks. With linux you could go with a hyper minimal DE with not much in the way of shiny features and go a whole lot further.
I’ve never seen a distro take more than 2gb RAM ootb (ubuntu gnome and kde are probably the “heavy” contenders), excluding precached files. In either case, Windows or Linux, you lose big time the moment you launch a web browser.
The fresh install of Manjaro KDE on my laptop is using 2.6gb on a fresh boot right out of the box.
I forget what distro it was (maybe neon?) that was using like 3.X gigs of ram on a fresh install. That was the point that I realized this wasn’t the Linux of old.
I switched to KDE Neon lately and holy fuck does it chug down my battery in a few hours time (though most of the consumption is from Firefox so can’t blame it completely on the distro)
Not prefect, but c’mon. You can run Linux+GUI in a potato, but even KDE Plasma is not nearly close to Windows in RAM/CPU usage (excepting misconfigurations of baloo).
Linux aint perfect either. Look at the memory usage of most modern “fully featured” distros. They’re using damn near as much at idle as windows is. Same thing going back 10 years in time.
The key is with windows you get one windows, and maybe some tweaks. With linux you could go with a hyper minimal DE with not much in the way of shiny features and go a whole lot further.
I’ve never seen a distro take more than 2gb RAM ootb (ubuntu gnome and kde are probably the “heavy” contenders), excluding precached files. In either case, Windows or Linux, you lose big time the moment you launch a web browser.
The fresh install of Manjaro KDE on my laptop is using 2.6gb on a fresh boot right out of the box.
I forget what distro it was (maybe neon?) that was using like 3.X gigs of ram on a fresh install. That was the point that I realized this wasn’t the Linux of old.
It probably was Neon. I switched recently and (for me) it’s more resource hungry than Kubuntu, even.
For shits and giggles I just tested out Ubuntu 25.04 and it’s only 1.3 gigs with it’s stock Ubuntuified de.
For as much shit as Ubuntu gets it’s really not that bad compared to some of the others.
I switched to KDE Neon lately and holy fuck does it chug down my battery in a few hours time (though most of the consumption is from Firefox so can’t blame it completely on the distro)
Not prefect, but c’mon. You can run Linux+GUI in a potato, but even KDE Plasma is not nearly close to Windows in RAM/CPU usage (excepting misconfigurations of baloo).