Comment by andai
10 hours ago
I somehow remember Linux using half the resources it does today, 20 years ago. It occurs to me now for the first time, that this might be due to the switch to x64.
That's probably not the only reason but it bothers me that I never considered that before! I remember at some point it used twice as much RAM for basically the same thing, and I remember being bothered by that.
But I guess what you get in exchange for that is the ability to put in basically unlimited RAM.
It's just the price of progress. When I started playing with Linux, a full fledged Linux desktop with web browser and all ran very happily on a machine with 16 megabytes of RAM. At the time, there were distributions that fit on a floppy disk.
Both are more or less impossible now, but I don't think we should think of 100mb of "background state" as bloated. The fact that your can get a lot of useful stuff done on Linux in under 512mb in 2026 while Windows and Mac need multiple GB just to get out of bed is pretty awesome.