Used to build “little old lady” computers for neighbors and such. Say someone gave me their shit PC to fix. Fine. Throw in whatever extra hardware I had, clean it up, new thermal paste and whatnot, small SSD, Linux Lite, Chrome, “Here’s how you get email and internet.” Never once heard from them again.
Here’s the secret sauce; I never once mentioned “linux” or even began explaining what I had done. No need to talk OS, it was “windows” to them! I was there to fix computers, not evangelize.
As long as you “put the internet on the desktop”, most boomers won’t know the difference. I got my dad a new laptop and he asked me to “install Google maps on it”. I put firefox on his desktop and changed the icon to a Microsoft Edge icon and that was easier to do than try to explain what a browser is and that he should use a different one.
Yes! I’ve forged the icon more than once. “Just as ever, click the blue ‘E’”.
My dad once had trouble with Internet explorer crashing a computer in an auto shop he was working in.
I installed chrome which worked much better but he would not stop trying to open the Internet explorer icon.
Changed the chrome icon to IE icon. Problem solved. Lol
I was running Plex, Jellyfin, Nginx, rtorrent with 3k torrents and few other containers and they were running on a very old machine with 4GB of RAM and only 2GB were really used.
Well sure, but did you also run a hundred unterminable processes that analyzed your behavioral patterns in real time and fed that information into a surveillance pipeline directly hooked into Microsoft data centers?
Because if not, then what are you even doing with your life?
The only RAM issue I ever had was running
nixos-rebuildon a RPi with 1G RAM.All that extra telemetry that you can’t turn off uses a lot of resources it seems
I like that this is both true and false.
The memory management of an OS is almost always entirely dependent on what it’s doing or designed to do. Linux and Windows are able to do similar things, but are rarely tasked with the same workloads.
Windows desktop (aka, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, 11) are designed to be more pretty and run desktops that the user will see/interact with, etc. I will say that Microsoft knows their audience and the windows prefetch stuff is quite good, all things considered…
Windows server on the other hand… Until recently, it still shipped with IE11 as the only browser. Of course as soon as you started it, the whole system would complain and tell you to go download edge… Server is a beast unto itself.
Additionally, as an IT support person, I always prefer people have more RAM than they need, rather than less. Getting that figure just right is nigh impossible. And if you have the RAM, you should use it, right? Because otherwise, why would you have it? It becomes a waste of money.
Prefetch and memory caching is a good use of memory, and a big reason why Windows has very little memory actually “free” at any given time… I’ll note, I’m mentioning free memory, not available memory.
It’s a fascinating topic, honestly.
With all that being said, I’m not saying that Windows is actually better in any way. My entire point is that there’s merit to the different methodologies of the different operating systems. They’re built differently and that is a good thing.
You do not need 3GiB of ram to look pretty though. I think Windows is just badly optimized.
Great points! Yet, Linux = greased lightning, Windows = sludge. So your great points can go suck off a polar bear.
My main issue with Linux is that it doesn’t reserve any CPU time for itself. Push it to 100% usage and the mouse cursor lags all over the place. I think this a Wayland thing.
I used to have that issue on x11 but never again since switching to Wayland.
This is just a straight up lie lol. Donald Trump levels of nonsense. New low, fellow Linux users.
relax mate
Experienced users are known for being able to customize their install to be lightweight enough to function with modern tasks on old hardware. I myself have an install on an old 4gb MacBook Air that runs just as well as my server with 64 gb of RAM for the task load that I’ve deployed on it.
4gigs is a perfectly reasonable amount of RAM for word processing, web browsing, retro gaming, basic development (if you’ve got another rig to deploy compilations to), and a whole host of other applications.
The fact that one can use a wm/compositor to make the desktop lighter is sick. I was using 350MB idle with Alpine + River, it is so damn snappy.
I came to Linux for freedom and stayed for the performance.
Let me intoduce you to sub 100MB idle on OpenBSD with BSPWM (80~90MB)
Damn, how low can one even go?
640K of memory should be enough for anybody.
