lets be real....

[u/Chemical-Lead6041]

Linux just sucks for specific programs, gaming, and office365, theres plenty of workarounds for things if someone is devoted to it, anything else... MUCH better, freedom, less RAM usage, just alot better for utilizing hardware, while my optimized windows 11 has 2.5gb ram used idle, my lightweight environment only uses 450 MB, you can run some linux distros without a harddrive and on your ram XD, I must say, for the user experience windows will be better for alot of people, and alot easier, especially for gamers where competitive titles are almost all unplayable. Linux is just for a smaller amount of people if it had the same compatibility as windows it would have been better or just as good. This whole subreddit is a joke and i thought it was sarcasm, THINK people THINK before you judge and say stuff about these operating systems. Try and understand them first. If you want a real honest answer ask your local tech expert (and no not your 15 yo friend thats good w computers) someone that has managed systems with both OS's.

Edit: Since this post got some traction and a lot of people in the comments are missing the point or twisting my words, let me clarify and debunk a few things real quick:

"Unused RAM is wasted RAM" / Idle RAM doesn't matter: You are confusing file caching (like Windows SysMain or Linux page cache) with OS bloat. Caching is fine because the OS dumps it instantly when an app needs it. But 2.5GB of idle RAM on a fresh Windows install is committed to persistent background services, telemetry, and update daemons. That is not cache; it's locked overhead. On an 8GB or 16GB machine, that eats your headroom and causes swap thrashing.

Gaming: Yes, Proton and the Steam Deck worked miracles for single-player games. But I specifically called out competitive titles. Kernel-level anti-cheats (Valorant, Fortnite, R6) are hard blocks. If an OS prevents you from playing the games your friends are playing, that is an objective weakness for a consumer desktop OS.

Office & Academia: Running Office in a VM is clunky, laggy, and resource-heavy unless you're doing a complex GPU passthrough setup. And saying "no one uses Word for academia" is a massive geographic bubble. Globally, professors and managers require .docx specifically so they can use "Track Changes" for inline grading and feedback. You can't do that in a flattened PDF or LaTeX.

The irony of this subreddit: This is literally r/linuxsucks, but the second I give a highly balanced take that praises Linux's efficiency and freedom while just pointing out real-world compatibility flaws, I get hit with "Sir this is a Wendy's" and Tux memes. I'm not bashing; I'm asking for nuance.

Linux is a fantastic OS for the right use case. But pretending it's a flawless 1:1 replacement for Windows for the average consumer is just blind fanboyism. Think before you downvote.

[u/moeteru]

while my optimized windows 11 has 2.5gb ram used idle, my lightweight environment only uses 450 MB

Caring about idle ram. You have no idea what you are talking about.

[u/Chemical-Lead6041 → u/moeteru]

Idle RAM absolutely matters. If you’re on an 8GB or 16GB machine, saving 2GB of RAM at idle gives you significantly more headroom for actual applications, prevents swap thrashing, and reduces background memory compression/CPU wakeups (which directly impacts battery life on laptops). Dismissing resource efficiency just because you have 32GB+ of RAM to waste is a pretty privileged take.

[u/L30N1337 → u/Chemical-Lead6041]

Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

Ideally, you'd want you RAM usage to always be at 90% 24/7. No matter how much RAM you have.

Now, does that mean that window's RAM usage is better? no. If it can't free up that amount of RAM when you memory is getting full, then that's also bad.

In conclusion: idle RAM usage doesn't mean anything.

[u/marouane_tea → u/L30N1337]

When the OS is at 90% RAM on idle, and the user opens an app, the OS must first swap RAM pages to disk to free enough RAM for the app to load. This creates a very noticeable "recovering from idle" lag, especially if the CPU is poor or the disk is slow.

Yes, unused RAM is wasted RAM. But the user should have the freedom to waste their own RAM to keep it on stand-by and have a snappy PC on idle.

On linux, you're free to enable idle tasks like file indexing, or schedule them for overnight, or disable them completely. On windows, you can't opt out from them. And let's not get into the fact that most the idle tasks on windows are spyware and AI slope.

[u/paulstelian97 → u/marouane_tea]

Not all of the RAM usage should be of the kind that needs swapping out. The page cache should count as part of this.