Why Windows is superior at memory management than Linux?
just my experience; not a 1% expert on either
As a kid I used Windows XP from 2004 all the way upto 2016, when I finally switched to Ubuntu 16.04. Initially the move was made to be cool among my peers, little did I know it was not the cool choice but the autistic nerd’s choice, nevertheless I stuck with it until 2020(when I had enough). Since then I have used Windows for work, personal stuff and have administered 1000s of Windows servers on the cloud and in datacenters around the world.
As I grew more into software development in college, I started demanding more out of my laptop running Linux. And it delivered for most kinds of workloads, unless it was particularly RAM heavy, in which case the laptop came to its knees. I played around with swap after reading some poorly written guides on the interwebs. This did not help. Building an apk on Android Studio proved impossible at times with Linux just giving up on the task midway. Even with virtual memory being implemented in the kernel, going above the physical memory limit on Linux is a remarkably bad experience. Load a large enough file into memory and your terminally will read “Killed” after struggling a couple of seconds.
Windows on the other hand will never let you realize you don’t have enough RAM as long as you manage to give it a half decent solid state drive. Need to run 3 VMs on 8 gigs of RAM and a browser and some music? You got it. Things will swap in & out of memory, things will get compressed and decompressed but you will never read the dreadful “Killed” message appear(If you artificially limit the page file you do get some version of it).
Leaving personal computing & development aside, even in operations high RAM usage on a Linux machine is the death toll of that server. You cannot even ssh into the thing to do something about it, you either force restart it or just wait for it to crash of natural causes. Never once have I seen a Windows server do this, login always works. Your disk is full? No worries it’ll keep things going until you can add some disk space to it.
Linux gets a lot of praise in the circles where I hang out in, but in some aspects its just archaic and equivalent of a rusty factory machine that does a few things extremely well.
-Day 1 of June, 2024
[Not a Linux hater, not a Windows lover either :P]