My hope is that with the end of Windows 10 coming up, laptops with 7th generation CPUs will become really cheap, such as ThinkPad P51 and P71. They are a decent budget choice < 1k USD/EUR already, but might drop way under 500 with top specs.
It’s not like they are useless, but the market for Linux users should be satiated quickly once a selling panic sets in.
For most use cases, including backend development, they’ll be good enough for many years to come. tbh, I’m still happy with my i5-2500 from 2011 and 16 GB RAM, and that is with local DB, application server, IDE and everything running locally.
They already are. Last year I bought a 7700k with gtx1080 for 250, and bought a similar 8600k with gtx1080 for the same price around christmas. Those things run everything we throw at it, running Linux.
When that happens, I can finally retire my Thinkpad x200 laptops which serve as print servers and diagnostic software VM hosts. One can never have too many Linux laptops
As someone who was forced to start using Windows again after ten years after ten years of exclusively running Linux: Why is it like this? Everything is so crappy and slow!
It’s always been like this. Those 10 years ruined you as a Windows user.
It’s definitely gotten more wasteful lately in particularly. You could run 8.1 on any computer that supported Vista, and IME it was even a little snappier, but 10 and 11 have each been significantly worse.
i3wm on a 32bit IBM thinkpad is still instantaneous-response-fast
i only recently moved my main home pc from 8.1. 1st gen. mechanical disk, 32gb ram and pascal gpu. i skipped all the way to a rufus’d 11 and it’s actually running well (with all the crud ripped out, though).
I have recently booted into dad’s decade(s?) old xp pc and was baffled by how snappy that thing was…
XP was snappy at first, but then I used to install a couple of programs and things started to suck big time. It was always the registry. At the time, a lot of people I knew, used to just format Windows on a regular basis, also because the spyware and malware were so prevalent.
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.
Not prefect, but c’mon. You can run Linux+GUI in a potato, but even KDE Plasma is nearly close to Windows in RAM/CPU usage (excepting misconfigurations of baloo).
Linux also uses a lot of ram for disk caching, it’s flagged as a form of available memory so there’s no performance overheard for this.
Disk caching is almost never included in the ram usage numbers. Or if it is it’s specified as caching, but still not factored into the number.
Huh TIL, had a look through my system and it sits at about ~5GB not including disk cache. Been on Fedora KDE since 39 and have put it through its paces so I’m pretty happy with that
I would’ve reformatted windows twice in that time because of bloat accumulation, and like you said there’s always room for improvement with hyper minimalist packages.
God I love Linux.
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.
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.
It probably was Neon. I switched recently and (for me) it’s more resource hungry than Kubuntu, even.
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)
Partially because Defender does a lot of unnecessary work. Partially because Explorer now has Chromium under the hood of many elements.
Also Copilot. Not even joking. Having so many copilot buttons in apps is not an issue. The issue is to actually try using it. Even a light conversion crashes both the desktop an Android clients too often. At this point I would rather have those resources consumed by actual AI running locally than on a crappy frontend. Pathetic.
Don’t they have the whole “copilot+ ready pc” branding thing now for computers with npus? is none of it actually local yet?
Its logging half your shit, and trying to advertise to you anywhere it can! Get used to it…
And ontop of that, they have no incentive to work on performance, if they made it better you’d have less of a reason to upgrade your machine, they want to slowly make performance worse and worse to maximize this effect
If you upgrade your machine it becomes easier to sell you AI, since AI will work faster on an upgraded machine. Hence it’s a win-win for Microsoft.
Except now I’m on Linux
Realtime antivirus scanning is a big culprit. I’m sure all the advertising/telemetry junk doesn’t help either.
updates. the constant barrage of updates. the cpu, ram, and disk time needed just to ‘check’ for updates is horrible (it used to be a lot worse, too). and if you are still on an old-school mechanical hdd, those ‘cumulative’ updates are absolutely brutal every month with win10 or 11.
last week i booted-up a silverblue that hasn’t been run in a couple months. 8gb, mechanical disk, not a speed demon either–3rd or 4th gen. i didn’t even notice the updates were coming in until the notification popped up saying they were done.
I’m dual booting on my laptop cuz I need windows for something, but 8gb ram is too much on Linux and the same amount of ram is too little on windows, Like I have 170 processes and 6gb ram usage at idle with my apps running in background, very poor memory management.
It’s nearly the same for me, except it’s been nine years, and I’ve been using both Linux and Mac. It’s not bad enough to look for a new job, but oh man, I hate it so much.
Why use a mac when you can emulate it in linux? (heck, even with GPU passthrough!)
My company gave it to me for work, and I used it, just as I do now with the Windows machine.
windows 11 straight up requires 16gb of ram now.
it idles at almost 8 (!!!) fucking gigabytes for some stupid reason.
It’s using the unused RAM for caching so it can be slower faster
it swaps like hell with 8gb of ram, they truly optimize it to be as slow as possible.
Im so old, but 8 gb still seems like such a large amount of ram when I think of it briefly. And peeps out there with 100 gb lol. But yeah my win11 laptop that has 64 gb, it’s slower than my 10 year old amd fx desktop mint with 20 gb. By a lot.
it is! its just windows 11 that’s very ram hungry.
Part of growing up dirt-poor is making use of any hardware possible. I excel so much at that skill now thanks to all the open source projects out there (the WM, DEs, distributions, TUIs, …). I can really squeeze a lot from a tiny host & having this mentality as a dev now is some times appreciated 😄.
Some times. :/
Well, to be honest, I went a little overboard and installed Cinnamon on Arch. My girly setup with 4gb can no longer do push-ups with one finger.
Tbh you can probably make a Linux install act like windows if you wanted. So that’s another point in favour of switching for people who are undecided. It can be as slow and bloated as your windows install if you want it.
Not if you have Firefox open. Three YouTube tabs and my 4GB Pi5 is swapping so hard it takes forever to move the mouse anywhere.
Firefox fixed its memory hog problem for a bit after 2016 or so and immediately got to work on how to get just as bad again.
microSD or NVMe?
Well… Not exactly, Linux doesn’t handle low RAM very well. Usually the system just crashes if you open too much stuff
what is this? If something, it is low RAM that Linux handles extremely well ?!?
I mean
If you try to open modern JS bloated websites that reinvent scrolling in multiple tabs dont expect to have good performance
It will crash if you max out your ram and have 0 swap, in the same way your windows system will crash if you have 0 page file.
In recent years its become really trendy to just not use swap on linux and it pisses me off to no end. Its a horrible configuration all to save like 1% of your diskspace.
edit: Also, most distros out of the box do use significantly less than windows. My debian testing xfce install that I just did here a few days ago uses 700mb on a cold boot.
it doesnt crash ime, but it does choke up a lot when ram is full.
much harder to get to that point on linux tho.
Pfft, me and my 15 Firefox tabs take 5GB RAM minimu.
Strange. I use Firefox with 18 tabs open right now, and I use 1,5 GB of RAM…
Most of it is cued up videos I’ll probably never watch. I’m horrible.
I don’t understand why my PC is so slow
I actually just switched from a laptop with 4G of RAM this year. It had a spinny drive so it was a little slow, but I was really only using it to watch videos over the network. This was all very snappy once it booted. Opening Firefox was pretty painful and would cause swapping though.
I wish I could go one day on Lemmy without the Linux bros jumping into every community
Without Linux folk you wouldn’t have Lemmy. Nobody’s forcing You to switch, you can pay as much attention to Linux posts as any other shit you’re not interested in (that is, none) rather than making it a whole thing.
Without Linux folk you wouldn’t have Lemmy
That’s the kinda arrogance that causes me to hate Linux bros. You guys are just like every other kind of bro.
You could try not to use Lemmy for one day. It’ll be okay.
Well, Windows as such don’t need more RAM as some Linux distros, What is wasting the most RAM is all the telemetries, services not needed, trials, adware and other crap which Windows has by default when you buy it with a new PC. Windows need average users because of this capables to fix it, not needed in Linux. That is the difference. A gutted Windows is pretty fast, without all the trash which is loaded on boot. Eg,only diseable the hybernation service reduce a big part of the RAM, because it make duplicates of all open apps as temporary files, to load these on the next startup. same with the index service to find files somewhat faster, which waste memory to write any change to the index, not really needed in mdern PC and less with an SSD. Only diseabling this 2 services can increase the speed and respond more than 50%.
But the normal user don’t do it and only claimes that Windows becomes slower and slower, because it is more and more filled with temp and trash files. That is the problem with Windows, because MS sells you a car, but by default with a huge caravan which you don’t need, that must tow.
16GB RAM on windows is more than enough
And pretty sure 4GB on linux sucks
So I’ve done a Linux install on a 4GB Chromebook, with 16GB eMMC storage, and what I learned is that it really depends on what you use the machine for, and which distribution you run. If all you’re doing is word processing, managing emails, and browsing on YouTube, you can absolutely run Linux comfortably with 4GB, provided you pick one of the leaner Linux distros. For reference I ran Gallium OS, which was a Xubuntu flavor specifically tuned for lower end Chromebooks.
ETA: In comparison, I had a relative who bought a laptop off those TV sales networks that had a similar CPU RAM and storage setup, except running Windows 10…it ran slower than a snail, and one day it had a Windows update that was too large to fit on the combined RAM and page space. The poor woman couldn’t use the computer because the update forcibly ran in the background and consumed all her memory every time she turned it on. So yeah, you can’t game on Linux with only 4GB of memory, but I am confident that I can do a major OS update on it at least.
Sure, but it stops at that
Man my Linux system is so great, I spend all my time on it to talk about Linux. It’s so great I spend all my time to talk about how great it is
Windows only mfs so used to being different levels of inconvenienced we can’t make a post showing appreciation without coming off as bragging
Honestly I didnt get it until I switched, but its fun to talk about. I was never really that interested in my operating system before switching, but now I’m reading a book on how linux works and genuinely enjoying learning from all these online linux communities.
You lost? This is a Linux community, what are we supposed to talk about? Your mom?
better than talking about how bad Windows is? It’s so frustrating some organization still force me to use it.
