As someone who deals with various windows bullshit on the daily, 8gb for win11 is fine assuming you don’t use any applications. If you want to actually use the machine, 16gb is the absolute minimum
But you’ll definitely want OneDrive, Teams, Edge, Chrome, Adobe and your totally necessary “anti-virus” to run in the background 24/7 right?
Windows 10 had a minimum requirement of 2GB RAM, with 4GB recommended for a comfortable experience. Windows 11 bumped that up and then kept needing more as the OS got heavier with every update cycle.
…to 4 GB…
I’ve used Windows 10 with 4GB. It’s not a comfortable experience. Neither is Windows 11 with 8GB.
Why the fuck does the OS need so much memory?
Everything always gets bolted on with no consideration for memory footprint. It’s basically 2 decades of software inside the memory because if they delete something it breaks.
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.
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.
Yeah and if you’d use Linux your work laptop
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
Yeah no. I’m at 32 and task manager says that 28+GiB are being used on idle. The sum of everything that appears on task manager doesn’t reach 2GiB.
And it’s not “the OS is using it because you aren’t”, because if I do anything demanding, the OS won’t give me back that RAM, it’ll use the swap instead.
That is not how this works. The system isn’t using all that, I can guarantee that. Even launching a terminal (or any app) as hidden will not make it and its usage appear in taskmgr - I once unknowingly managed to exhaust my 64GB by launching hundreds of terminal sessions withoutever killing them. Try something like sysinternals process manager to see what’s actually going on.
You have other problems beyond windows. My laptop has 32gb and it uses like 6.5gb with nothing open on the desktop.
And it’s not “the OS is using it because you aren’t
That was nonsense int he first place anyways
Windows doesnt include cache in the used ram procentage