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MacOS handles memory pressure better than Linux imo (at least for interactive use cases)

I have seen MacOS overcommit up to 50% of memory and still have the system be responsive.

Yesterday I filled up my ram accidentally on Fedora and even earlyoom took several minutes to trigger and in the meantime the system was essentially non-responsive

The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.

It's exactly what it is

How do you think data is created? It's lots of anecdotes, normalised.

This is with earlyoom/systemd-oomd enabled ?

From my experience it does not help much, and I still get occasional freezes when a program misbehaves on Linux. It’s not a huge problem, but it is a problem and it exists; I have been dealing with it for about 15 years with no significant improvement.

The earlyoom/oomd changes are quite recent.. I've had a 'better' experience, but I guess it's not really fixed yet.

Yeah, Fedora ships systemd-oomd

It did eventually work to but it took a while. It also did not killed the culprit runaway processes somehow but it did kill enough stuff for me to regain control of the system.

macOS uses solid-state drives to do swap to help increase virtual memory. I can run multiple browsers and IDEs smoothly on my 8GB MacBook.

Best kernel recommendations? Mainly for extremely long running (2+ years) SaaS applications. Stability overall. Is running a handful of docker containers and some binaries.

Linux LTS if stability is the most important. Realistically, "normal" Linux works for for it too, not sure you have to care as deeply about what kernel you use as you seem to do.

On my desktop I use linux-cachyos-bore-lto which seems to give me a slight performance boost in compilation times compared to the regular kernel, but I've had at least one crash that I've unable to attribute to any other specific issue, so could be the kernel I suppose, I wouldn't use it on a server nonetheless.

For desktop use, I find that being on the latest stable kernels is best because you get things like recent AMD graphics drivers and support for recent hardware and laptops. I’m in an arch-based distro and my kernel updates all the time. I’ve never had an issue. The stability benefits of LTS seem completely useless in comparison. Just my opinion though.

If you’re running applications as in a server that’s an entirely different discussion. I have been assuming we are talking about desktop users who are not serving anything.

E.g., if I go out and buy a 2026 Panther Lake laptop with a new WiFi 7 chip or what have you, I’m going to want a distro with the latest kernels so that I don’t have hardware issues. If I install the default Ubuntu download it’s going to almost certainly have problems.

FreeBSD is touted for long running and stability.

Both Ubuntu and Trisquel have backports for mainline and LTS kernels. Also, GNU/Linux has ZRAM, 4GB can work as 6.

I am not an Apple fan, so I'll just tell my story. And yeah, it may be biased, and I may not understand something important.

So around ~3 years ago or so I bought a lightweight low-end laptop (Intel Core i3, 14 inch display, 8GB of RAM) for everyday stuff so I could easily bring it with me everywhere I need to go (I mean, everywhere I would need it). It came with Windows 11 pre-installed. Now, for you to understand, previously, like ~10 years ago or so I had a Windows 7 system and it was pretty neat. And I remembered when people were switching from Windows 7 to Windows 8 or 10, they blamed the new OS version just like right now the Windows 11 was blamed; yet everyone got used to it, it received some fixes, improvements, etc; so I thought "well, maybe Windows 11 is not so bad, I should try it out at least just for the sake of curiosity".

And now, the clean installation of the Windows 11 that came to my was requiring like ~20 seconds to fully boot up to the login window. I know that my laptop is not best of the best, but still... After a startup, with no apps opened, there was like ~4 GB of RAM usage just out of nowhere; so effectively I was limited to ~4GB of RAM to run something I want to. Bluetooth drivers were terrible (at the time) - sometimes I was able to connect to my headphones and sometimes I wasn't, while they were working with all of my other devices perfectly. Then there was also this hellish "Antimalware Executable" - and I know how it sounds, I have nothing against anti-virus software, but when it randomly shows up several times per day, eats all of your processing power (like ~80% of CPU usage, and note that I have 8 cores ~3 GHz here), heats up your laptop to the point that fan starts screaming... that was not very good, to speak softly. Battery usage was also a disappointment - sometimes it couldn't last for just 3 hours, while the most heavy thing I was doing during that time was compilation of some software.

I was trying, I was re-configuring, I was applying patches... and finally I got fed up with all of this bloat, broken updates and other garbage. So I just backed up all of my important files and data to external drive and installed Linux Mint (because in this particular case I just needed working laptop). And wow, it just worked! Now at startup I get like ~1 GB RAM usage at most (this actually depends on the DE I use, so numbers could be different from time to time), battery life improved, no more weird Bluetooth issues, no more random bloatware... it just works, and that's it.

I know that distros like Mint are focused on stability and efficiency, so maybe the comparison is a bit unfair. But hell, even while I don't have anything against Windows 7 or Windows 8, the recent Windows 11 is a real combination of bloatware and spyware. So performance and memory efficiency is, actually, the problem here. Or at least it was a problem last time I tried it.

Now, again, I may be wrong somewhere, maybe I missed something out. If I did - please point it out.

I just logged in to my MacBook Air M2 (24GB RAM) with no programs open and it’s reserving 8.3GB of RAM and using 500MB of swap.

My Framework laptop running CachyOS with KDE Plasma with nothing open except System Monitor reserves 4GB with 500MB in swap (I enabled swap for sleep to hibernate, normally there’s no swap).

Reserving RAM doesn’t mean there’s a performance problem.

Most of the things you’re talking about in your comment have nothing to do with RAM usage and memory efficiency. You’re complaining about some annoying preinstalled OEM software [1], bad drivers, fan noise, battery life, and windows updates. That stuff isn’t great but a lot of it doesn’t have anything to do with Windows RAM efficiency itself.

If you download the Windows ISO from Microsoft and clean install you’ll have a pretty nice experience. I think Microsoft needs to crack down on OEM software additions.

As far as slow boot up times/slow initial setup I’ll remind you that Macs also have that as an issue during first boot and spend a lot of time doing initial indexing.

Linux mint is a great distro and I also prefer Linux to both Mac and Windows as well. Mostly my commentary is on the subject of people claiming Microsoft Windows is bad with RAM when we now see some Linux distros asking for more RAM than Windows. I think it’s quite clear that RAM isn’t the problem with Windows, it’s a lot of other things and the surrounding ecosystem.

[1] I have to assume you’re talking about some third party antimalware program because the Microsoft one absolutely does not behave how you describe.

> Reserving RAM doesn’t mean there’s a performance problem.

It does in my own experience (so it may not be a problem for you, I agree, but it is a problem for me). Because when OS allocates ~50% percents of RAM for itself and isn't letting it go, then other software simply can't use it. Therefore, you're limited. Your potential performance is capped at certain level just because your OS decided to allocate half or more of your system RAM. Why? Well, just because it wants to.

> have nothing to do with RAM usage or performance

Well, to be honest, most of them don't. But would you please explain then, why it takes around 20 seconds just to boot up, while for the aforementioned Linux Mint (and I'll clarify that it's currently 22.3 for me, the latest version, it was 22.1 at the time as far as I remember) it's only around ~3-4 second to take me to the login screen and then another second (at most) to load everything after I have logged in? Could you also, please, explain how does it happen that even GNOME's Nautilus file explorer takes less RAM and far less CPU usage than Microsoft's Explorer (and I won't even mention Thunar, that's kinda unfair)? What about "Start" menu in Windows which spiked up CPUs just by opening/closing? There's a lot of performance issues, both with RAM and CPU usage.

I'm not saying that these problems are unique to Windows, no; but saying that Windows doesn't have any performance issues is not really true.

> I think it’s quite clear that RAM isn’t the problem with Windows, it’s a lot of other things and the surrounding ecosystem.

I agree with you here. That's true. A large part of the problem comes not from the actual operating system, but from the application software. I thought once that well, maybe if RAM shortages will last longer than for just one or two years, that will be bad, but also, maybe - just maybe - some software developers will start to think at least a bit more about optimization...

> [1] I have to assume you’re talking about some third party antimalware program because the Microsoft one absolutely does not behave how you describe.

Editing without specifying that you have edited your reply is not very good, you know. But okay.

Actually, I'm talking about the Windows-shipped Microsoft Defender process (at least it seems to come from Microsoft Defender). I have not seen anything third-party installed on my laptop at the time, and it actually behaved just like I described. I should also remind you that it is a low-end laptop, that's just Intel Core i3-N305, it's not the most powerful CPU in the world - just 8 cores, 8 threads and 3.80 GHz of max boost frequency.

If you think that I'm lying, then just search for "antimalware executable high CPU usage" in any search engine. You will find a plenty of complaints and even some guides on how to deal with it.

Does it behave like this all the time or just at specific moments?

I find on my Windows system it's only doing things when specific actions are happening.

Right now the antimalware executable process is using 196.4 MB of memory and 0% CPU for me as I type this.

When I download an executable from the Internet and run it, the CPU usage spikes to 8-10% briefly and the RAM usage goes up by 30MB or so.

I have a much higher-end CPU than that, 6 cores 12 threads (AMD Ryzen 5600X3D)

In my experience the executable is pretty much doing nothing unless I'm opening up an exe that's trying to elevate privileges or if it's doing an active periodic scan.

> Does it behave like this all the time or just at specific moments?

Strangely, but these were... specific moments, but not too specific. I mean, it wasn't running from the startup till the shutdown, but I also don't remember any specific triggers such as running untrusted applications or something similar. However, I guess that, according to the CPU usage, it most probably were full system scans. One thing remains unclear though: why, despite me turning off this feature, it was still quite frequently (I'd say way too frequently for normal operation) performing the full scan. I have no ideas. I'll not list everything I tried and checked here - because it would be too long - but the most "suspicious" thing I downloaded at the time was ImHex executable. And I don't think any anti-malware would spend ~80% of CPU processing power just to scan one relatively small app. I checked different things that could trigger it - but found nothing.

> Right now the antimalware executable process is using 196.4 MB of memory and 0% CPU for me as I type this.

Likely because it's idle as you type this. It wasn't using all of my CPU resources all the time, it's just that it could randomly spike up at some moment, run for ~1-2 minutes (sometimes more), drag the system into thermal throttling despite the active cooling (a bit of hyperbole here but still, it was really able to heat hardware up) and then disappear.

> if it's doing an active periodic scan.

As I mentioned, most likely that was the issue: frequent periodic full-disk scans.

For me, the worst thing was not that it was happening at all. To be honest, the worst thing was that I didn't understand why it was happening or how I could fix it. I just felt humiliated by the system that I, supposedly, owned. I know that I might have done something wrong or missed something, but... That still doesn't feel any good, you know.

> I wouldn’t go so far as defending Microslop

> I do get tired of the Apple fanboys accusing Windows of being bloated and running poorly.

> Windows has a lot of problems but performance and memory efficiency is not one of them.

I can't even describe how much your experience differs from mine. I would never have imagine someone to utter such sentence about Windows in todays day and age.

For everyone else reading this, a couple of advice I have gotten that made me suffer less with Windows is to replace Windows search with Everything (by Voidtools) and replace Explorer with Filepilot (filepilot.tech).

On a older machine, I switched to Tiny10.

I also use Everything. But I'm not sure how Windows Search not being the best has much to do with the system's overall RAM usage.

Explorer works fine for me but File Pilot does look cool. I'll give it a try. (Good luck replacing Finder on Mac, is that even possible?)

I only use Windows for desktop and if I was clean installing I'd probably switch it to Linux. My laptop is Linux then I share a macOS system with my partner which I occasionally use for things that require Mac.

I wouldn't say I suffer at all with Windows. It's fine. It runs, it performs well, it's stable. I can't speak to other people who have different experiences. I usually assume they're using some kind of OEM abomination while I used the plain ISO downloaded from Microsoft, and I've already gone through the ~10 minutes of effort to turn off the annoying stuff.

I sold my personal Mac and switched to Linux on Framework 13" after Liquid Glass came out. It was almost as jarring and poorly executed as Windows 8. Well, okay, maybe that's going too far.

(The other problem with my MacBook was the tiny amount of storage was growing difficult to work with, much easier to toss a 2TB SSD into a Framework and finally be done with worrying about storage)