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Microsoft admits 8GB RAM is fine for Windows 11, after years of pushing 16GB as the baseline
(www.windowslatest.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2026
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Maybe it is. I don't know. But I've read a lot of comments suggesting that Windows burns RAM harder than MacOS and Linux.
I'm so glad my work is buying laptops with 32GB of RAM. Finally, we're in the future. (I think true nerds need more, but these are office people using Word and Outlook. It's glorious.)
Linux? Depending on the distro, ram usage is a joke. Got a rpi and a NUC running Debian as a server (so without running the display environment constantly) and the use ~ 500-800mb ram. With a DE, they need like 1-1.2gigs.
The nuc is particularly funny since it hosts 2 Nextcloud instances, 2 websites and a qwen3 embedding model and sits at ~ 6gb ram.
Wait, is this a Debian-exclusive feature?
Guess I need to take a second stab at setting up my own server
it's not an exclusive feature, as you can you can do this on most if not all distros. it's just that Debian is better suited to server (this is a bit objective) since the packages are less likely to change and break on you (so reliability and stability)
Yes you can disable the DE on Debian and probably on other distros too.
I "disable" it the wrong way, since I want to have it after a reboot, for diagnostics, I just shut it off via systemctl For gnome it should be: Systemctl stop gdm3
But you can also configure it to always start headless. And if you need it you can launch it again from the shell.
This is irrelevant for work, where you need a web browser and work applications (which are probably more web browsers). My work laptop is currently sitting on 33G used out of 64G.
Yeah and if you'd use Linux your work laptop would be sitting at like 6gb, if you'd just browse the web and edit text documents.
The only time I ever need more than 10 gigs on my main machine is when I play games. Windows and Linux aren't even close in normal use cases.
You can even try it yourself, grab yourself a 10 year old laptop and install any Linux distro on it, it will feel like a new machine.
which I do so maybe remove your head from wherever it's stuck and rethink.
Memory use of applications is not especially different between operating systems (assuming no compression). The hand the OS has in memory usage is mainly its own memory usage, but that is dwarfed by application usage. In the case of an application like, say, Firefox, its core is written in languages like C++ with explicit memory management. The same code runs on both platforms, so when you open a webpage, the same data structures are needed in the same quantities. CPU architecture can change how much memory a structure needs, but OS doesn't. So the application requests essentially the same number of bytes from the operating system, and the OS reserves that many bytes for the use of the application.
You can get into more detail than this, resulting in some small differences, but given that you started with a hilariously wrong assumption I don't think there's any need.
Ok Mr grumpy