Pavan Davuluri says the rising cost of memory is why Windows 11 will use less RAM, with work on the memory manager, WinUI 3 and WebView2.
Bullshit, Windows 11 uses more ram than any other OS I know of. It idles an entire gigabyte higher than Windows 10, it’s still worse than MacOS although close, and it’s nowhere close to Linux Gnome, Headless, or even KDE Plasma.
Yes, Windows 11 uses a lot of memory now. The point is that they’re working on making it use less.
doubt
Oh it may well be true, doesn’t mean they will succeed.
Yes I understood that but I am arguing against the implication they made when they chose this specific language and connotation, so I am insinuating that it will still use more than every other OS unless they gutt all the adware and spyware.
Use lessUseless
Ftfy 🤣
Their first step should have been to disable all the data collection and „AI“. If they were actually serious about saving resources.
Unused ram is wasted ram.
RAM that’s hogged by windows is wasted RAM. It should be used by programs and for caching.
Technically, it is being used by about 30 more background processes than Windows 10 had.
“unused ram is wasted ram” is only valid when that memory is buffer/cache. Except the windows UI isn’t allocating excessive buffers or cache that can be freed under memory pressure or when an application needs it. It’s allocating actual memory pages for the JS rendering engine and other bloated vibecoded services.
Not when your system just booted and is idle.
I can guarantee that windows 11 will use zero gb on all my devices
i got my windows install down to 0 RAM by using Linux.
Cool story.
blocking permanently for moronic comments.
Lol
Surface Pro owner asked if Microsoft would improve memory consumption, since they had to disable on-device AI services just to run a local model.
A cynic would say that customers disabling Copilot is finally what forced Microsoft’s hand.
I disable every single new feature from all non Foss vendors. Theyre ALWAYS shit. 99% of the time its a shitty ui change for no reason and now shitty ai thats useless for no reason.
Whatever happened to good software. They all went to Foss lol
Publicly traded company shareholders, baby!
Any project worth its salt is privately held or FOSS lol
That’s why Valve/Steam holds the line. People think public corporations can choose not to be evil; they legally can, but it’s practically impossible. That’s why we need strong government and regulation.
Hang on, how many surface pro owners are trying to run a local model i.e. local LLM on 8GB ram? I’ve got 32gb ram and it struggles with most larger models
Smaller models, probably.
Sure, but how many people who actually know how to install a local LLM are using it on a laptop with 8GB ram? I guess if they have an NPU it might help
The effect is that OEMs are bringing 8GB laptops back, and hopefully, Windows 11 won’t choke on it.
8GB of RAM: the gift that keeps on giving. In 2005, you were basically running a supercomputer. By 2015, you were… still doing fine, honestly. Fast forward to 2025 and your machine is wheezing like it just climbed five flights of stairs while Chrome is open. But wait—2026 rolls around and suddenly 8GB is back to being acceptable again because everyone finally realized Electron apps were a mistake and went back to native development. Just kidding, we’re all doomed. Your IDE alone needs 12GB now.
Some devs in the big corpos got spoiled with so much memory, with feature creep they managed to bloat up once reliable programs.
In 1994 and when I began compsci, I remember how memory and bandwidth conservation was then taken so seriously, where performance was a high consideration over eyecandy (at the time, PCs were still 386s, 486s and some Pentiums coming out, and most I used had either 1mb or 4mb of memory available). That I once got hold of Creating Killer Websites (yeah, that book), which included a section on how to slim down images to make them download faster, as at the time nearly everyone were on dialup. Videogames were then equally small, they were mostly sprite-based and were easily fit into a CDROM, as other games had basic vector graphics and low-resolution texturing.
which included a section on how to slim down images to make them download faster, as at the time nearly everyone were on dialup
I’m looking at you, lemmy sidebar header images that don’t get scaled down after uploading and are often > 5 Mb.
Yeah any time you hear devs saying “developer productivity “ you can associate the software they produce with higher ram usage, larger footprint, slower and doesn’t work unless your internet is fast.
It’s wild reading about the old game systems, like Atari, and all the tricks and techniques they used to cram data and code into small amounts of memory.
For the whole system, or just the spyware part?
Yes.
Great now remove the motherfucking tracking ID
Linux: You guys have tracking IDs?
I mean, Linux could have any tracking id it wants
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Which one? Or, like, all of them? Naaaah.
Meme: windows 11 sucks, the entire population must shift to Linux asap.
All part of the goal of turning personal computing into cable TV by making everything web app SASS.
It’s not just the Windows OS that uses more RAM than others. Every bloody App these days left memory optimisation in the dust a long time ago.
The base OS itself is only a fraction of the issue
I think a lot of that depends on platform though. If you’re having electron apps like Discord active on your desktop the whole time, memory usage will be a constant issue for you.
I replaced a lot of my proprietary software with FOSS suites that run locally (with the exception of Steam and GOG launchers that I don’t have running in the background), and I haven’t had any issues with memory since.
Plus, using Ublock Origin on a Firefox fork tends to prevent junk from loading in the first place while browsing the web (and saves a shit ton of ram)
I recently had to configure an older Thinkpad X1 Carbon G8 for my little brother. It’s only got 8GB of RAM unfortunately and he needs Windows.
So I installed Windows 11 IoT LTSC like I usually do, installed all necessary drivers and manually deactivated services that don’t need to run. It still uses 3GB of RAM while idling.
My 2-year-old daily driver Manjaro install uses half of that, and that’s on a system with 32GB RAM where Windows would almost certainly use more just because there’s more
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I haven’t looked at Tiny10/11 in a long while actually. I remember it not really working that well, although maybe it still was in beta back then.
iot would be the far better choice over using one of the debloaters or minimized installers.
10 is EOL, so I wouldn’t use it anymore tbh
10 still receives free updates, LTSC will have support for some time after and IOT I think until 2030.
But Debian will work in a fucking toaster for the next forever, so there’s that.
unless your toaster is only 32 bit.
Debian 12 has support for 32 bit and security updates until 2028.
So really not reaching 2030 for that toaster, but better than any multi trillion company
IoT is supported until 2032
The thing is those are just security updates, most software will work for the time being, but it only been a year and some newer DX12 games already having issues with 10 unfortunately.
So in other words, it worked just fine.
I’ll believe it when I see it. I mean, Windows has a lot of auto-loading bloatware that Microsoft could cut, but I really doubt they’ll actually have the balls to cut any of it.
Add in all the bloat from HP and Dell too. It’s pretty bad.
Which particular bloatware apps? You can turn things like DropBox off via start up apps menu
My Windows 2000 machine had 512MB of RAM. With it I could browse the web, run full-featured word processors, scan images, edit images, play 3D games, edit / compile / debug C and C++ programs, and so on.
If memory serves, my office machine about that time only had 128MB of RAM. It was slower, but it could do just about all of that stuff, too.
I’m not sure there are any broad categories of tasks I use computers for today that I wasn’t already using my Windows 2000 machine for back in 2001 or so.
It’s hard to fathom where all the RAM in modern systems goes. A million somethings is a lot. A million bytes is a huge amount of information. War And Peace is under four million characters.
My first win95 machine had 32MB, win98SE had 128MB, win2k had 512MB, and winXP had 8GB, my win11 has 128GB.
This is why it is (often) so important that a new generation takes over. They haven’t experienced this as we did. They mostly don’t know.
So every new generation is a new opportunity to pull off this shit.
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Hibernation was useful when people shut down their machines (like, actually shut down, not sleep) and getting any process started was a slow ordeal. Nowadays you don’t really turn your computer off anyway. Windows doesn’t by default, at least. Newer laptops often don’t even support real sleep, you’re expected to keep them running 24/7.
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„We bought all the RAM and will rent it back to you later.“ -„AI“ companies
As AI, cloud-native development, containers, and open-source ecosystems continue to converge on Linux
When the VP Windows Platform is telling things like that, it’s time to let it die already…
[ ] Source
Sure, I’m going to start running my containers using WSL. Who knows what kind of wonderful surprises are in store in the network layer? How the environment parameter passing will be somewhat more brittle with funky new ways to break because of new characters you have to escape? I can’t wait to troubleshoot all of that, and spend countless hours on MS forums and meet fellow colleagues with similar issues. What fun.
You forgot the bot reply on the ms forum closing the issue 4 years ago because “there was no interest” in the conversation. Closed = no need to fix surely.
dude, windows uses paging even if it has a free bank of memory to use…i’ve seen it with my own eyes…it’s a complete trash OS…swaps like nobody’s business
If you’ve eg. a system service that allocated a whole pile of memory on startup, but hasn’t read or wrote it since, then copying it to swap during idle disk time is a good thing. If it does get used, then it’s still in RAM, and if memory pressure increases, then you can reuse it immediately because it’s already on disk, don’t have to wait to swap it out. You could give this functionality a catchy name like ‘swappiness’ so you could fine-tune how aggressively it’s done by setting the value in a file, too.
Doesn’t stop Windows being a trash OS, of course, but if I’ve allocated swap then I want it to be used for best system performance.
I have swap allocated too, but if you’re sitting there continually powering RAM and have a whole lot of it available (rarer these days), it doesn’t make a lot of sense to throw all of your running programs into it when there’s no current memory pressure. It degrades performance needlessly.
I love how little linux swaps with a large amount of RAM. I was one of those fortunate enough to buy computers with large amounts of RAM before the rampocalypse occurred. So I have 64gb in this laptop, and I want it to be used.
