One of the things Windows users complain about the most is the excessive consumption of RAM. In the minimum requirements of the operating system, Microsoft recommends having 2 GB of memory to be able to install and use the OS. Other operating systems, like macOS, have similar requirements. However, Linux, which is a fully functional operating system and with which we can do almost the same as with the other two, has much lower memory requirements. Why?
That an operating system uses more RAM is not bad, as long as there is enough RAM. In the case of Windows, what happens is that the Microsoft operating system comes standard with a large number of services, processes and programs loaded in memory that, little by little, add resources. We may never need many of these services and processes, but there they are, occupying tens of megabytes of RAM that add up. For this reason, a freshly installed Windows can occupy about 2 GB of RAM, while Linux only comes close to 1 GB.
The concept with which Linux is programmed is different from that of Windows. The free operating system is designed to load the minimum, what is strictly necessary, to function. Therefore, during startup, everything that we are going to need is loaded, depending on the configuration, and all other services and processes are turned off. If they are needed, they are launched at the time of their execution, but by default they are deactivated.
Lightweight Linux distros, which can run with 128MB of RAM and even less, take advantage of the removal of services and resources to load the least amount of memory during startup. That, together with the SWAP (memory swap with the hard disk) make Linux use much less RAM than Windows to boot.
But once in operation, the consumption is similar.
The problem is in the operating system: the programs consume similar
The fact that the operating system consumes less RAM does not imply that the programs that we are going to run use fewer resources. Quite the contrary. A program, like Google Chrome or Firefox, will consume more than 1 GB of memory in Windows and Linux as soon as we open several tabs at the same time. Even on Linux, if you need additional processes or services, you will have to enable them.
A program for Windows will consume practically the same amount as a program for Linux. Likewise, there is some program that consumes a little less in Windows, and another that requires less resources in Linux. But on average, all cross-platform programs consume the same thing on both systems.
Optimizing RAM can make Windows go faster
The RAM memory is for use. If we have 16 GB of RAM, or 32 GB of memory, and Windows, programs and resources consume a lot, let them do it. We don’t have to obsess over keeping memory to a minimum. When we are running out of memory, the system itself will free up space by deleting data that is not needed in order to have the space we need available.
However, if we are tight on memory, we can always resort to programs that allow us to optimize and free up RAM in Windows. We can even activate virtual memory to be able to dedicate a small space on the hard disk (or better, the SSD) to function as RAM memory in case we are short of it.
And if we continue to have problems with the PC memory, we should think about buying a module to expand it. After all, it is better to have free, unused RAM than to be scarce.
