I know this is !LinuxMemes but it'll throw this here. Comparing memory usage like this is meaningless. My Linux desktop for example consumes around 20GB with nothing visibly started. ZFS would happily gobble up half of the system RAM for caching unless limited. And caching means speed. If your system isn't caching a lot, it might be leaving speed on the table. Demand caching!
I don't get why this is always mentioned. Windows caches too and uses up all free space for faster application startup, but just because it also does it doesn't change the fact that it uses more ram for active processes while doing nothing. I remember Minecraft running a lot better on my old MacBook with just 4gb of ram as Ubuntu used less than Mac OS X and I could allocate more to the game, whether cacheing was enabled or not on those OSes was not relevant. This should not be relevant today as 32gb of ram can be purchased for less than 100 bucks but sadly is as Apple and other laptop manufacturers think selling soldered 8gb is ok for a base model in 2023 for a laptop costing more than 300 bucks
The ancient MacBook in question has a firmware limitation and thus only supports 4gb, it was already upgraded from 2gb iirc (black 2007 MacBook 3,1).
My current laptop has 16gb soldered, too bad that the hinge will die again before the ram becomes insufficient
I’m still using my 2014 MBP as a daily driver. They’re surprisingly long lasting. Only thing I’m rolling with still that’s older is a Lenovo X220 that I use to play a starship bridge simulator with haha.
RAM is the fastest and most expensive memory in your PC. It uses energy, regardless of whether you use the memory. Not utilising RAM is a waste of resources.
There’s a reason good monitoring tools draw a stacked RAM chart.
Exactly. I wish we moved to a process lifecycle that has a "save your data because you're dying upon the return from this function" stage, similar to the way Android has it. That would allow us to keep a lot more processes in RAM. But it would require massive software changes given the body of software written the classical way and so it's unlikely to happen.