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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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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