I don't understand why my PC is so slow
this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2025
582 points (95.8% liked)
Memes
51827 readers
2540 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
Tbh you can probably make a Linux install act like windows if you wanted. So that's another point in favour of switching for people who are undecided. It can be as slow and bloated as your windows install if you want it.
16GB RAM on windows is more than enough
And pretty sure 4GB on linux sucks
So I've done a Linux install on a 4GB Chromebook, with 16GB eMMC storage, and what I learned is that it really depends on what you use the machine for, and which distribution you run. If all you're doing is word processing, managing emails, and browsing on YouTube, you can absolutely run Linux comfortably with 4GB, provided you pick one of the leaner Linux distros. For reference I ran Gallium OS, which was a Xubuntu flavor specifically tuned for lower end Chromebooks.
ETA: In comparison, I had a relative who bought a laptop off those TV sales networks that had a similar CPU RAM and storage setup, except running Windows 10...it ran slower than a snail, and one day it had a Windows update that was too large to fit on the combined RAM and page space. The poor woman couldn't use the computer because the update forcibly ran in the background and consumed all her memory every time she turned it on. So yeah, you can't game on Linux with only 4GB of memory, but I am confident that I can do a major OS update on it at least.
I dual boot. It's so painful to go back to windows but some work related software doesn't run at all in Wine. Perhaps I should VM W10 or W11.
I am working to decommission a windows server, which is currently using 500gb ram, and i have moved all functions to a different application, same purpose and very similar underlying methodology... 32gb of ram on linux. it's crazy how much bloat windows admins are willing to accept.
I actually just switched from a laptop with 4G of RAM this year. It had a spinny drive so it was a little slow, but I was really only using it to watch videos over the network. This was all very snappy once it booted. Opening Firefox was pretty painful and would cause swapping though.
As someone who was forced to start using Windows again after ten years after ten years of exclusively running Linux: Why is it like this? Everything is so crappy and slow!
Its logging half your shit, and trying to advertise to you anywhere it can! Get used to it...
And ontop of that, they have no incentive to work on performance, if they made it better you'd have less of a reason to upgrade your machine, they want to slowly make performance worse and worse to maximize this effect
If you upgrade your machine it becomes easier to sell you AI, since AI will work faster on an upgraded machine. Hence it's a win-win for Microsoft.
Except now I'm on Linux
It's always been like this. Those 10 years ruined you as a Windows user.
I have recently booted into dad's decade(s?) old xp pc and was baffled by how snappy that thing was...
XP was snappy at first, but then I used to install a couple of programs and things started to suck big time. It was always the registry. At the time, a lot of people I knew, used to just format Windows on a regular basis, also because the spyware and malware were so prevalent.
I'm dual booting on my laptop cuz I need windows for something, but 8gb ram is too much on Linux and the same amount of ram is too little on windows, Like I have 170 processes and 6gb ram usage at idle with my apps running in background, very poor memory management.
Linux aint perfect either. Look at the memory usage of most modern "fully featured" distros. They're using damn near as much at idle as windows is. Same thing going back 10 years in time.
The key is with windows you get one windows, and maybe some tweaks. With linux you could go with a hyper minimal DE with not much in the way of shiny features and go a whole lot further.
I've never seen a distro take more than 2gb RAM ootb (ubuntu gnome and kde are probably the "heavy" contenders), excluding precached files. In either case, Windows or Linux, you lose big time the moment you launch a web browser.
load more comments
(3 replies)
Linux also uses a lot of ram for disk caching, it's flagged as a form of available memory so there's no performance overheard for this.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Not prefect, but c'mon. You can run Linux+GUI in a potato, but even KDE Plasma is not nearly close to Windows in RAM/CPU usage (excepting misconfigurations of baloo).
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(6 replies)
My hope is that with the end of Windows 10 coming up, laptops with 7th generation CPUs will become really cheap, such as ThinkPad P51 and P71. They are a decent budget choice < 1k USD/EUR already, but might drop way under 500 with top specs.
It's not like they are useless, but the market for Linux users should be satiated quickly once a selling panic sets in.
For most use cases, including backend development, they'll be good enough for many years to come. tbh, I'm still happy with my i5-2500 from 2011 and 16 GB RAM, and that is with local DB, application server, IDE and everything running locally.
They already are. Last year I bought a 7700k with gtx1080 for 250, and bought a similar 8600k with gtx1080 for the same price around christmas. Those things run everything we throw at it, running Linux.
When that happens, I can finally retire my Thinkpad x200 laptops which serve as print servers and diagnostic software VM hosts. One can never have too many Linux laptops
I have a laptop with 4gb ram that i've been using kde plasma on and fairly frequently it just freezes or I have to restart because I had like 6 tabs open in firefox
Although I don't remember having that problem as much when I was on xfce, but I also might not have been using it as heavily then
I've never had a similar problem with chrome on chromeos with the same amount of ram, I think chrome+chromeos might be more aggressive with unloading tabs
Sometimes it does actually kill firefox but sometimes it just becomes very slow (1-2 seconds per frame) or freezes entirely for several minutes when out of memory. Might be just because the swap is really slow, but there's just 2gb of that, why would it freeze for several minutes? (One time this was happening was when I was trying to compile llvm on two threads, I ended up having to temporarily kill the desktop environment to save ram)
Can I run WoW on Linux?
Yup, absolutely. I use Bottles to manage mine, and run it with ProtonGE. You can also use Lutris, but I recommend not using their auto-installer and setting it up yourself. The auto-installer is an old, broken community one.
You can download the scripts and edit them, I do that from time to time.
It is possible, you'll need some extra application though. I believe Lutris. Perhaps there are other ways, never tried wow on Linux.
load more comments
(1 replies)
windows 11 straight up requires 16gb of ram now.
it idles at almost 8 (!!!) fucking gigabytes for some stupid reason.
It's using the unused RAM for caching so it can be slower faster
it swaps like hell with 8gb of ram, they truly optimize it to be as slow as possible.
Im so old, but 8 gb still seems like such a large amount of ram when I think of it briefly. And peeps out there with 100 gb lol. But yeah my win11 laptop that has 64 gb, it's slower than my 10 year old amd fx desktop mint with 20 gb. By a lot.
it is! its just windows 11 that's very ram hungry.
Part of growing up dirt-poor is making use of any hardware possible. I excel so much at that skill now thanks to all the open source projects out there (the WM, DEs, distributions, TUIs, ...). I can really squeeze a lot from a tiny host & having this mentality as a dev now is some times appreciated 😄.
Some times. :/
Not if you have Firefox open. Three YouTube tabs and my 4GB Pi5 is swapping so hard it takes forever to move the mouse anywhere.
Firefox fixed its memory hog problem for a bit after 2016 or so and immediately got to work on how to get just as bad again.
load more comments
(1 replies)
view more: next ›