Seriously, Don't Buy a Windows 11 PC ~~With 8GB of RAM~~
Fixed that for them
I just bought a Win 11 laptop last month for work.
It runs my Linux distro extremely well.
Seriously, Don’t Buy ~~a Windows 11 PC With 8GB of~~ RAM
Should be more accurate at today’s inflated prices
Don’t use windows haha.
That's a crazy high amount of RAM to just run Windows. Roughly double 10-15 years ago. IDK why but I assume any increase in that time is just unnecessary bloat.
A lot of it is a genuine increase in package content (oi, oi), including extra tools to run 64bit programs, higher resolution textures, more features means more code, and as time goes on standards change and so do dependency requirements.. Take Minecraft, V1.0.0 is (because you can still download it and yes it's legal) ~50MB after asset downloads, and version 1.21.11 is ~1.2GB. The RAM increased in unison. That's because of everything I mentioned before it.
But Windows is a different matter. I'd say probably more than half is bloat, but at least they let you choose to download some things like a hypervisor or IIS server tools. Copilot should've been a Windows Feature off by default. "Please, please put it behind a paywall!"
As it stands my Linux OS runs on <2GB and it's not affected by the amount of programs I have installed.. The only OS that's sustainable on the RAM that Microsoft, Google and Apple are selling, is Linux.
Personal computing is becoming the enemy of corporations. How do we keep the infrastructure of production alive without their consent?
Linux
The description seemed like extreme usage for how a lot of people use laptops for casual personal use. Not good for work or AAA gaming, but if you think ram prices are gonna crash soon and can get by with 8gb for now, upgrading in the near-future could potentially be an option.
That said, I wish I had upgraded my work laptop to 32GB instead of 16GB, which I did before prices skyrocketed...
The problem is that you have to be really careful about the laptop you buy if you intend to do that. A lot of laptops now have soldered, non-upgradable memory, as we're hitting the bandwidth limits of what DIMMs can do, but the bulk of the industry hasn't transitioned over to CAMM2 (the new removable standard) yet.
EDIT: Here's a Reddit discussion from four years ago saying that even at that point, it was very difficult to find any laptop models that didn't have at least partially-soldered memory:
https://old.reddit.com/r/laptops/comments/uzjmim/ultrabook_without_soldered_ram_do_they_even_exist/
Don't buy a Windows PC.
You could have ended it there.
You know, that honestly does make me kind of wonder what an actually decent, modern low-memory configuration for a Linux desktop is. I generally avoid blingy desktop stuff, but I also usually max out the RAM on my systems. I did once, for the hell of it, use a 2GB (upgraded from 1GB) eeePC for a few years for work, just to see whether I could reasonably do it. Had a lot of other software engineers chuckling at me, but I put the thing on a cantilevered platform to put it right in front of my eyes, so the tiny screen filled most of my visual field, and used an external keyboard with it. I used it mostly to run a web browser and terminals on a remote Linux system, so mostly as a thin client, was doing compilation and such remotely. The basic configuration, aside from being Xorg, i3, and urxvt instead of Wayland, sway, and foot, was pretty similar to my current configuration
just that I had about 2% of the memory I presently do. I didn't run heavyweight things, like games, compilations, etc. I'm pretty sure that I occasionally used LibreOffice locally, though.
I kind of wonder if I could reasonably use a 2GB Linux desktop system today without too many tradeoffs. A lot of games would be off the table, but outside of that...I wonder if current browsers could be made to run in a reasonably low-memory configuration.
You can definitely run a 2GB Linux system now if you're using it like a traditional Unix system, console only
there are much smaller, specialized Linux systems out there, like OpenWRT routers. But I'm talking graphical and at least lightweight use of typical productivity software.
EDIT: Debian says yes for the current release:
https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/amd64/ch03s04.en.html
Table 3.2. Recommended Minimum System Requirements
Install Type RAM (minimum) RAM (recommended) Hard Drive No desktop 512MB 1GB 4GB With Desktop 1GB 2GB 10GB
The actual minimum memory requirements are a lot less than the numbers listed in this table. With swap enabled, it is possible to install Debian with as little as 350MB. The same goes for the disk space requirements, especially if you pick and choose which applications to install; see Section D.2, “Disk Space Needed for Tasks” for additional information on disk space requirements.
The installer normally automatically enables memory-saving tricks to be able to run on such low-memory system, but on architectures that are less tested it may miss doing so. It can however be enabled manually by appending the lowmem=1 or even lowmem=2 boot parameter (see also Section 6.3.1.1, “Check available memory / low memory mode” and Section 5.3.2, “Debian Installer Parameters”).
Installation on systems with less memory[2] or disk space available may be possible but is only advised for experienced users.
It is possible to run a graphical desktop environment on older or low-end systems, but in that case it is recommended to install a window manager that is less resource-hungry than those of the GNOME or KDE Plasma desktop environments; alternatives include xfce4, icewm and wmaker, but there are others to choose from.
That being said, there are going to be applications that can, based on workload, definitely not work reasonably on such a system. Dunno how Chromium/Firefox would do, as one of the two is kind of essential for most desktops today. The OS can only do so much there, aside from getting other things out of the way and maybe using compressed swap.
EDIT2: Apparently, on low-memory systems, Firefox will unload the content of background tabs, and has a priority list for unloading them; this is visible in about:unloads. That sounds like it's a substantial part of its low-memory strategy. I suppose in the case of extreme memory pressure, you'd only ever have one tab, the visible one, actually rendered and residing in memory.
I have an Acer Aspire One (very low spec mini laptop from ~2010) with 2GB of ram; it runs modern linux distros with xfce with better performance than it had running Windows 7 when it was new (which is what it came pre-installed with). Doesn't run much modern software obviously but it does work for web browsing (firefox). It's noticeably slow, but it always was.
About the same, I have an old netbook HP Mini 311 with an Atom 270 or something, it came with 1GB of RAM and winXP, I installed another 2GB to have 3GB, worked fine, then installed MX Linux with Xfce, even the nvidia GPU was working fine in it.
For fun I tried to install win10Pro, it worked!!! was basically unusable, but it booted to the desktop.
Yeah, though last I looked, Xfce was still really X11-only, so unless that's changed, I'm assuming that you're running X11. A lot of my unknown here is "how does a Wayland-based system operate under low memory environments", because that
well, and systemd, but I'd bet that systemd is less memory-critical
is probably the largest chunk of the system that got replaced in recent years.
searches
It sounds like it's working in very preliminary form, but they've got a ways to go:
https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap
For Xfce 4.20, the plan was to add preliminary support to Wayland to core components without losing X11 support. This doesn't mean that by the next major release an Xfce session on Wayland will offer all existing features, but we hope it will be minimally usable. We also intend to continue refining our applications to work acceptably on Wayland (those that already work or can be made to work with low effort).
For Xfce 4.22, the stabilization work continues. Reaching X11 feature parity is not yet our target.
We are now working on our own Wayland compositor. It is very early, under heavy development, and not usable yet. Please see its FAQ for further information.
Windows will use 5-9gb just to run. Most linuxes use 1-2GB for the heaviest desktops, and around 450-650MB for the lightest desktops. Memory usage is much more efficient under Linux nowadays.
My work laptop which unfortunately requires Windows is sitting at 13.7GB in use just for teams, Outlook, and 16 chrome tabs. In the next couple years I can see 24GB becoming the minimum recommended spec for Windows
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