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8GB wouldn't get me through a cold boot and the stack of corporate mandated ~~spyware~~ security agents.
Fuck Nvidia. Fuck SamA with a rusty chainsaw.
This thread is full of misconceptions about RAM use. It is normal and efficient for an OS to reserve memory for processes even if it not really used. This memory will be juggled around in case that is needed. It would be very bad for a modern OS if you somehow lowered your used RAM to near 0%. That would make the computer slower.
See for example this: https://www.linuxatemyram.com/
The same thing goes for Windows. It reserves RAM to be used. Like it should be.
Sure, Windows is bloated.
But posting screenshots of your task manager tells us nothing. If it uses 30% of your RAM at start time, that's fine. Or not. Can't really tell.
Modern OS that isn't Windows though can use significantly less RAM. It's all the telemetry shit and always-online shit thats been jammed into the OS that makes it run poorly. Theres no reason to run CoPilot in File Explorer.
I agree fully. But in this post's comments people don't seem to understand how RAM use works.
It should be used... It is good... Not using it is bad!
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or notepad...
The amount of available RAM (which includes RAM actively used for caches but which will be immediately reassigned by the OS if requested by applications) matters more if you do a lot of task switching.
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You know what doesnt need 32gb? Linux.
i havent used computer with less than 32Gb in a decade
Pretty privileged
Yeah seriously, why is this even a discussion. 32GB is the bare minimum acceptable these days, regardless of which desktop OS you're using.
All three of my PCs running Linux have 16GB in them. Never run out of RAM.
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32? It takes a lot to not only use 16, but to actively use it and be affected by slower pagefile access.
What? FF with a bunch of Jira tabs, Outlook, Teams, Excel, Miro, Spotify, and I am at 100% of 16 gigs. Not even saying anything about running a 8gig VM from time to time
Teams, Firefox, and Outlook and that’s most of my Windows work PC RAM gone. Have to close out of my dev work whenever a meeting is afoot because the calls fucking hammer this thing.
Teams is the most performance inefficient shit I've ever been forced to use.
We use both Zoom and Teams for meeting with partners. On my piece of shit work laptop, I have no problem with Zoom. Teams on the other hand will randomly cut my audio, lag my cursor, or cause peripherals to stop working when I'm in a meeting. I simply can't fathom how it's as bad as it is.
That's because Teams is a piece of shit, not because 16GB isn't enough normally.
16gb will go far on MacOS and any Linux distro you throw at it. Windows 11 will struggle.
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How much is your page being used? That’s a more real indicator. You should want all of your ram to be used.
When it's being used, stuff gets slower - so yes, I technically use it as an indicator, by noticing that my machine is slow because it's out of free ram
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Discord, spotify, Firefox and minecraft (with Mods) is enough to bring down my 16 gbs
Ehh, my main machine eats up 12-16GB with just background tasks, and that's on W10. Nobody gives a fuck about optimization since the late 00s.
E: just woke up my system
Well, I'm installing Linux (CachyOS) on my former W10 PC this weekend. So, my 16gb of ram will be well utilized.
At least someone still cares about optimization.
And CachyOS running KDE Plasma is the most RAM hungry setup. I took a Win 11 laptop with 8gb and threw Debian running Xfce and that's using like 300mb of RAM lol
I guess going from 7-8 to 600-1.2k seemed like such an improvement I didn't think to GO HARDER to 300. Though my Ubuntu server VMs get that I assume lol.
Ram usage isn’t important, it’s how much your page being hit. Otherwise you want your ram fully utilized.
The number of people that still don't understand this, even after it's been discussed ad nauseum for decades is frightening.
Unused RAM is wasted RAM. You want it used. You want cached data there for instant access. What matters is how much is available for something else if you need it, and Windows does a shit job of getting that info across.
I'm pretty sure I have the pagefile disabled; both C and D are NVMe drives, and D is raid0. I disabled superfetch a few minutes ago, rebooted, and don't see any performance impact, but the used memory when idle is now 10GB, vs the 19 in that screenshot. No other changes.
I could see the appeal if I was using a platter drive for my programs or frequent data, but it's not 2008 anymore. I'd rather see actual usage over 'the computer knows best'.
E: me spell good
SysMain / Superfetch has altered your perception of how much RAM you actually use.
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My Linux system (which used to run Window so it has 32 GB of RAM), won't even hit 8 GB if I'm not gaming. I've opened up multiple apps just to show how efficient it is. I think it was sitting around 4 GB before I started running things to see if I can make it balloon easily.
And I'm running most my apps as flatpaks which I've heard may add some slight overhead in terms of RAM usage - someone correct me if I'm wrong about this.
My work computer (granted it likely has tons of background security tools running) uses 10/16 GB's just to get to the desktop and do nothing. The best part is, because ~1.2 GB's of RAM gets allocated for the integrated graphics, I'm really only left with ~4.8 GB's of RAM to do actual work. But wait, it gets even better! This week I found out some bullshit Copilot feature was enabled and taking up another ~1.2 GB's of RAM, leaving me with a total of 3.6 GB's of RAM. So I disabled the WSAIFabricSvc service and reclaimed a sliver of dignity and work space.
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Damn bro, that's brutal.
Am I crazy or is this one of the very tiny kinda shitty silver lining to all of this? Software developers are being forced to optimize their shit?
They're not actually gonna optimize anything
You would think this would encourage better optimized software, but I doubt devs will actually do that. Most modern code practices are about ensuring that code is more easily maintained, often at the cost of performance. Breaking "clean code" rules can easily make programs run 10-25x faster, but will be much harder to maintain.
We also seeing a lot of vibe coding now, which mixes clean code practices (which are well documents online) with messier, less well planned code.
That's grossly over simplifying the problem. "Clean code" is also not a formally defined concept, which could include anything and everything.
I've had more performance problems due to hacky workarounds, themselves necessary because of lack of foresight during development, rather than a slow abstraction (in fact, I don't think I've ever seen the latter)
They wont though. They will press on as usual, and hope Nvidias (and others) dreams of cloudbased subscription computers somehow becomes reality.
Indie developers, like the 1-5 staff game studios on Steam, never stopped doing so. You can run most indie games on an old PC today. The big AAA game companies like Activision are taking a big gamble on the next generation, which they insist you'll need a newer console or PC to run. Bethesda tried that with Starfield and it didn't work out so well. The game's not as terrible as people say, but its kind of in the middle of the pack of AAA gaming RPGs and it demanded a fairly large amount of VRAM to run well. I predict things will not go well for games like Modern Warfare 4 that won't run on the last gen consoles or PCs. If developers aren't aiming at older devices then they're making a niche product not a mass market product
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What a fucking garbage can company.
Honestly, the only reason we really needed that much ram to begin with was because no one optimized anything.
I certainly won’t excuse Microsoft here, but if the RAM shortages cause developers to reevaluate their nonfunctional requirements, that will be a small victory.
Instead of that we got computer leasing agreements
Which is still insane, given that 10 wanted 1 or 2. We haven’t seen a jump like this since XP to Vista.
What is this, 2012?
Just ship them with windows XP or windows 7 if you only have 8GB RAM...
Do as we say not as we do
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this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2026
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