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Comment by PorciiVorbesc | Hacker News Reader

The windows kernel is smart enough to free RAM for the highest demanding app like rendering or video editing, even if the idle is high.

That's why there's no accurate 1:1 comparison between operating systems. Windows, MacOS, and LInux will treat physical memory very differently bot at idle, and during heavy use.

Sure, Win 11 has a lot of bloat and poorly coded Web apps that should be removed or rewritten in native, but the kernel is still top notch at managing even limited memory and handling OOM cases.

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The thing with windows is that there is no idle state, something is always busy with the CPU/hogging ram. With Linux I can have like 98% idle and the system taking 2Gb out of my 8gb of ram, but with windows, the system is more like 30% cpu and more than 4GB of currently being used ram.

If idle on Win 11 already pre-caches most-used apps like Chrome/FF and not on Linux, how can you accurately measure what true idle is?

You have to remember the Win (and MacOS) kernel is tuned to consumer desktop user use cases, while Linux kernel is tuned to server/DC use-cases.

That's why ~15 years ago when I was in uni, you'd get audio stutter when playing music/movies of spinning rust on linux while torrenting file on the same HDD, and not on Windows/MacOS, due to different queuing algorithms used thet prioritised audio decoding tasks over everything else, which Linux kernel out of the box didn't, unless you tinkered and changed it.

> You have to remember the Win (and MacOS) kernel is tuned to consumer desktop user use cases, while Linux kernel is tuned to server/DC use-cases.

I don’t mind the kernel doing kernel things. The issue is system services and other software that are either unnecessary or badly coded. You can’t disable them because of “reasons” and they’re just wasting your time and your electricity.

> while Linux kernel is tuned to server/DC use-cases

That depends on the distro / flavor of kernel; the Linux kernel is pretty flexible and you can cut it however you want. If you use a distro like CachyOS for example, you'll find that they use a kernel tuned for desktop use-case, so you don't need to tinker with anything.

A tangent to this which annoys me is not specifically windows, but the way the ecosystem has evolved over the years, by guidance/enforcement or lack thereof from MS. Unless you're very careful about what applications you install and how you manage/monitor them, you can end up with a lot of background applications loaded each boot, each doing some combination of non-centralized updating itself or applications it manages, preloading, quick launch, etc.

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