Linux mint is better than Windows 10

[Moonstone Man]

Noob here ... I thought that the RAM use in Win7 was bad. Now I'm in a live Mint session ... I would have expected a smaller percentage in this domain.

Experienced Linux user here. I would never expect a smaller percentage. Linux is not Windows, and it manages memory completely differently, so a comparison to what you would expect under Windows is not reasonable.

[Luke Johnson]

Fair enough, all the better. I don't know anything about the ways Linux and Windows manage memory. I did hear that some distributions foster the philosophy that unused RAM is wasted RAM.

My expectations were probably based on descriptions of desktop environments. If I remember correctly, an environment boasts as little as 400MB of used up RAM.

[Ivy_Pool]

I thought that the RAM use in Win7 was bad. Now I'm in a live Mint session. System monitor shows I'm using 72% of 16GB RAM. I close Firefox, and I'm down to 55%. Now I'm at 47% with LO Writer and Falkon up. I would have expected a smaller percentage in this domain.

I thought a live Mint session runs off the USB or CD/DVD. If that's the case, won't RAM memory usage be higher as it runs programs? Also, if the computer is running smoothly, why should percentage of RAM usage even matter? I'm a noob too so maybe someone could explain this.

[MurphCID]

Total Noob here. I find that Linux manages both RAM and hard disk storage very efficiently. At least on my system. My biggest complaint these days is that Linux generally SUCKS at power management (even with TLP). I wish that those smarter than I am would get the power usage issue fixed so that we can get close to Mac and Windows levels of performance from the batteries on our laptops. Plus I discovered that NONE of my current systems that I manage at the house (Spouse Unit, Kids, mine) will ever be able to run Windows 11.

[Larry78723]

@MurphCID - Unlike Winwoes and Mac who have paid developers all working from a common set of tools, Linux has numerous developers, mostly unpaid, using many different tool sets. This makes unified power management next to impossible.

[Moem]

I thought a live Mint session runs off the USB or CD/DVD. If that's the case, won't RAM memory usage be higher as it runs programs?

It does and it will. A live session runs more or less completely in RAM, so of course it uses more of it than an installed Mint.

[MurphCID]

@MurphCID - Unlike Winwoes and Mac who have paid developers all working from a common set of tools, Linux has numerous developers, mostly unpaid, using many different tool sets. This makes unified power management next to impossible.

I know, but I can still wish though.

[Bolle1961]

I thought that the RAM use in Win7 was bad. Now I'm in a live Mint session. System monitor shows I'm using 72% of 16GB RAM. I close Firefox, and I'm down to 55%. Now I'm at 47% with LO Writer and Falkon up. I would have expected a smaller percentage in this domain.

Linux Mint 20.2 Cinnamon installation, Firefox (8 tabs), Thunderbird and Netflix watching a movie : 3,6GB of 15,4GB (23,1%)
Live sessions use always more ram then an install

[Windows2LinuxNoob]

Not going to read every post here, but going to say that I have liked Mint much more from day one of installation than any MS, Apple, etc. product I have ever used. I just like Linux... So here's my opinion and what I have to say - I'm sticking to it. There is no reason for me to use anything else for personal computing at this point in time - that is Linux-based OSes in general. Mint was my introduction to the world of Linux distros and is my favorite thus far (by far). When W11 comes out, not planning on paying for a new machine, another license, etc. for the same stuff I've used for decades wrapped up in a "pretty" graphics. I need my machines to perform and I prefer to have them only do "stuff" I want them to do when I want them to do it. I seem to have gotten there with Linux Mint. I'm hoping I continue to enjoy Linux for the rest of my life.

[RickyRaccoon]

I thought that the RAM use in Win7 was bad. Now I'm in a live Mint session. System monitor shows I'm using 72% of 16GB RAM. I close Firefox, and I'm down to 55%. Now I'm at 47% with LO Writer and Falkon up. I would have expected a smaller percentage in this domain.

Linux Mint 20.2 Cinnamon installation, Firefox (8 tabs), Thunderbird and Netflix watching a movie : 3,6GB of 15,4GB (23,1%)
Live sessions use always more ram then an install

Yup. My Acer Power FH is unofficially maxed out at 4GB- 2 GB being the official max RAM for it- for whatever arcane reason Mint and Windows generally sees only a little over three of that four.

That's with a random assortment of open windows- Brave, Opera, Firefox, GIMP with a photo loaded up, Google Earth Pro, & Evolution email, on 20.2 Cinnamon. Still within my physical RAM, more or less. To me live sessions are fine for a general meet & greet but don't tell you really about performance.

[ivar]

Yup. My Acer Power FH is unofficially maxed out at 4GB- 2 GB being the official max RAM for it- for whatever arcane reason Mint and Windows generally sees only a little over three of that four.

on some motherboards, some of the RAM is used for graphics, and thus, unavailable for the OS. Sounds like thats what happens here..?

[RickyRaccoon]

Yup. My Acer Power FH is unofficially maxed out at 4GB- 2 GB being the official max RAM for it- for whatever arcane reason Mint and Windows generally sees only a little over three of that four.

on some motherboards, some of the RAM is used for graphics, and thus, unavailable for the OS. Sounds like thats what happens here..?

Well that's what I thought, except I'm running a NVIDIA GT 635. My Monitor (actually a very solid AOC 32" TV I bought from Radio Shack before its demise) has a spare VGA cable to nowhere- I know my BIOS is set for automatic switching of the onboard graphics if a GPU is in the PCIe slot, but for kicks I plugged the VGA cable into the back and rebooted. No signal- so it's not running dual graphics.

When I first bought the memory upgrade- I had it 'maxed out' at 2GB- I was doing a general upgrade- I had in a old Radeon card I'd jammed in it, and I went searching online to see what I could do about CPU and memory- based on what I found, I switched out the stock P4 HT 651 for a dual-core E4700- the fastest Socket 775 chip (unofficially) verified to run on this motherboard. And found the unofficial max is stated to be 4GB- only two slots- so swapped out my two 1GB sticks for a pair of 2s. I don't know if all my messing around has buggered something, or not- at first HTOP was reporting back in the high threes- something like 3.8GB range Then it dropped to under three. I thought maybe my new memory might have been defective- it's cheap enough (DDR2 I think) so got a fresh set and it went back up a little. At least it reads over three now. I've moved GPUs around a little- did I mess something up? has a solder joint got squirrelly?- and I thought I'd successfully updated the BIOS before I slapped the E4700 in it- but I get mixed feedback as to the actual BIOS version- depends where you look. And anyway the last BIOS update is still like from 2007 or 2008.

Or maybe the processor is dodgy- I'm sure it's been kicked around a good bit- it wasn't NOS. If it wasn't a PITA I'd consider slapping the Pentium 4 back in it- it's a HT, it ran 64 bit OS- just not as well as two physical cores. Slap it back in, see what it reports the memory as, but I really don't feel like doing that. This CPU is a bit slower but having two real cores sure is nice. With two cores and 4GB it actually runs Windows 10 Pro 64-bit decent- not bad for something that was bundled with Windows Vista Business 32 Bit! But on two Gigs and a P4, it was running Windows 10 about as fast as watching paint dry, & dual booting (I need Windows once a year) wasn't really viable.

It works- every now and again I get strange freezes running Mint, but they don't last and no telling where it's coming from- so I'm not super motivated to figure it out. I've heard motherboards of this one's vintage can and will crap out capacitors- maybe something's going bad. I don't know.

Edited to add BIOS reports Base+Extended of 3,276,800KB, and Windows Taskman reports 3.1 GB.

[ivar]

[It works- every now and again I get strange freezes running Mint, but they don't last and no telling where it's coming from- so I'm not super motivated to figure it out. I've heard motherboards of this one's vintage can and will crap out capacitors- maybe something's going bad. I don't know.

freezes that frees up after how long typical ?
My pc does that (2015 i5 with 4 GB ram) when it runs out of ram + swap. Increasing swap from 2 G , then 4 G and now 6 G makes those freezes happen more seldom. I run Firefox , and with many tabs open it like to gobble up available memory
I'd think if it was faulty hardware of some kind, the pc would have a much harder time to recover from the freezes/crashes..

[Larry78723]

More likely than capacitors is an overheating CPU.

[RollyShed]

I've heard motherboards of this one's vintage can and will crap out capacitors- maybe something's going bad.

Lift the lid and look. Easy enough.
https://rollestonshed.wordpress.com/com ... -problems/

Fixing means knowing which end of a soldering iron is hot. I've replaced hundreds.

[RickyRaccoon]

Freezes that frees up after how long typical ?
My pc does that (2015 i5 with 4 GB ram) when it runs out of ram + swap. Increasing swap from 2 G , then 4 G and now 6 G makes those freezes happen more seldom. I run Firefox , and with many tabs open it like to gobble up available memory
I'd think if it was faulty hardware of some kind, the pc would have a much harder time to recover from the freezes/crashes..

Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't. If I have trouble with it I'll start making notes of it- and not necessarily everything's freezing up, sometimes it's just like keyboard input but I can run the mouse around just fine. Now, I DO notice freezes if I'm running software that taxes the memory and bumps into Swap- which is set at two. But I really get into swap only if running something like Firestorm viewer. I've heard the complaints about FF on this forum.. yeah I use Brave for most things, and Opera for a few other little things. I don't care for FF and haven't for a long time.

More likely than capacitors is an overheating CPU.

True- I thought I did a well-enough job when I swapped out CPUs, though. Bought what's supposed to be 'good' stuff with a reasonable production date, and studied until I knew just how I wanted to apply it, and had thoroughly cleaned all surfaces as suggested.

Not sure I believe this- I saved this post as a draft and rebooted to BIOS and it's reporting back a CPU temp of 31C. And a system temp of around 40. That seems really low for the CPU temperature, but that's what the BIOS says.

Thing is this CPU may have been rode hard, though.

I've heard motherboards of this one's vintage can and will crap out capacitors- maybe something's going bad.

Lift the lid and look. Easy enough.
https://rollestonshed.wordpress.com/com ... -problems/

Fixing means knowing which end of a soldering iron is hot. I've replaced hundreds.

Hadn't noticed any bulging caps but that doesn't mean I've missed over one- I've just sort of glanced at them in the past.

As an aside I used to work as a test tech in a plant that assembled populated circuit boards for various brands- including boards for the original IBM PC and AT- there was this Xerox Memorywriter board that would sometimes get one particular electrolytic cap installed backwards- you'd be slapping boards one after the other onto this board tester and sort of zoning out, then you'd hit one of those backwards caps and the cap would scare the crap out of you when it vented...

Don't relish ripping the whole mobo out of the case but I'd probably do it- I'm pretty fond of the old girl.

[pinballfan]

And found the unofficial max is stated to be 4GB- only two slots- so swapped out my two 1GB sticks for a pair of 2s. I don't know if all my messing around has buggered something, or not- at first HTOP was reporting back in the high threes- something like 3.8GB range Then it dropped to under three. I thought maybe my new memory might have been defective- it's cheap enough (DDR2 I think) so got a fresh set and it went back up a little. At least it reads over three now. I've moved GPUs around a little- did I mess something up? has a solder joint got squirrelly?- and I thought I'd successfully updated the BIOS before I slapped the E4700 in it- but I get mixed feedback as to the actual BIOS version- depends where you look. And anyway the last BIOS update is still like from 2007 or 2008.

Edited to add BIOS reports Base+Extended of 3,276,800KB, and Windows Taskman reports 3.1 GB.

I had a problem upgrading 3gb to 4gb ram on my motherboard. It was only stating about 3.2gb max. It turned out to be an out of date Intel integrated graphics driver. When I installed a newer version (the most up to date I could find) it reported the full 4gb of ram.

[Palladini]

I love Linux Mint. And Yes Windows 10 sucks so much, it is Pathetic People think it is a good operating system. It is not, I only came installed on Your Computer. There are Much Better and safer Operating Systems out there and in the Linux World, you can download the ISO and get a Program that burns that ISO to USB Thumb Drive, then restart your computer and run the USB drive. Install if you want, But I was a hardcore Windows 7 user, but when support for that ended, I installed Linux Mint to run alongside Windows 10, these days there is no Windows Operating SYStem On this Desktop Computer. I no longer need it, Linux Mint and Ubuntu Studio have everything I will ever need.

[RickyRaccoon]

I had a problem upgrading 3gb to 4gb ram on my motherboard. It was only stating about 3.2gb max. It turned out to be an out of date Intel integrated graphics driver. When I installed a newer version (the most up to date I could find) it reported the full 4gb of ram.

Interesting! You have me curious. Are we talking about a Linux driver, or something in the firmware?

I love Linux Mint. And Yes Windows 10 sucks so much, it is Pathetic People think it is a good operating system. It is not, I only came installed on Your Computer. There are Much Better and safer Operating Systems out there and in the Linux World, you can download the ISO and get a Program that burns that ISO to USB Thumb Drive, then restart your computer and run the USB drive. Install if you want, But I was a hardcore Windows 7 user, but when support for that ended, I installed Linux Mint to run alongside Windows 10, these days there is no Windows Operating SYStem On this Desktop Computer. I no longer need it, Linux Mint and Ubuntu Studio have everything I will ever need.

I'm not sure I hate Win10 so much I'd call it pathetic- I loved my Win10 cell phone. But yes there is no reason to be on Windows unless you just have to have it, IMO. I don't care if I get rich and buy a thousand dollar desktop, it's going to have Linux Mint on it as the daily driver. When I built my homebrew system, I had the intention of installing Mint as the only OS, and only later installed Win 10 as an afterthought. I like having it handy- I like the look of it, and if I had faster machines and there were still such things as Windows phones I'd be tempted to boot to Windows more often, perhaps- but it's slower & updates are a PITA- I prefer to turn off my computer or boot right to my OS without the Green Screen of Wait. Besides I just plain like going against the grain- which was part of the reason I had Windows Phones until that platform crashed and burned. I like to be different.

[pinballfan]

Interesting! You have me curious. Are we talking about a Linux driver, or something in the firmware?

It was in with my Windows 7 OS. The old drivers didn't seem to like the extra ram, and didn't utilise it correctly. The integrated graphics was Intel GMA 3100 I think. Once I installed the newer drivers (I think they were about 6 months to a year newer than what I had) after installing, the 4gb was fully functional. It must have been something to do with the integrated graphics sharing the memory, and the older driver must have been too old to know what to do with 4gb?

Whatever the case it solved that issue. I've not tried upgrading that pc to Linux yet, so perhaps I may run into problems. Still, it was a relief that I found what the cause of my problems was in that instance.

I think it may have been like that, even with a proper graphics card with drivers for that included. The Intel drivers being up to date were essential. Even when not in use.