Comment by jaydenmilne
11 hours ago
People forget that macOS and even Windows (well, pre-11) excel at swapping. There are all sorts of hacks and tricks they do to make sure the system remains responsive when under severe memory pressure.
This compared to Linux, where desktop environments seem to get noticeably bogged down and stressed out when swapping (the cursor starts stuttering and the shell becomes unresponsive).
Although even KDE does OK on 4gb of RAM in 2026 as long as you only have one instance of Chromium loaded.
I feel like a lot of this is that Macs come built in with very fast SSDs (although App Nap, when implemented by apps, is one of the best low-RAM features to ever exist)
It's definitely the software. My M1 Pro macbook running Fedora behaves very poorly under memory pressure.
Win 11 is actually way better at memory management than Windows 10. It's just more bloated.
That's only true for M Macs. Intel Macs with 8 GB of RAM perform pretty poorly.
My Intel Mac Mini with 8GB of RAM has always seemed fine on the rare occasions I use it.