Technology

I think a lot of PC users are spoiled, to be perfectly honest.

My work PC is an ancient micro Lenovo thing with a Skylake processor and 8GB of RAM, and it runs Windows 11 perfectly adequately. I generally need about 10 Firefox tabs open, as well as various other programs, and the only issue I find is that new Excel instances take a while to load - everything else feels perfectly reasonable. Don't tell anybody at work, but it even managed to play World of Warcraft at low graphics at the same time.

Not that this is a defence of Microsoft.

I got 16 gb on my W11 laptop, and I'm regularly bouncing off the 13 gb point where swap/ compression/ whatever kicks in and shit gets slow, doing relatively benign shit like browsing the web, YouTube and Gmail open, and vscode running working on some python shit. On 8 gb I'd probably have to use my phone for everything except vscode to get it to fit. It's not the lightest possible workload, but it shouldn't be slamming swap so regularly.

Absolute bullshit! That is not at all true, at least not until they bother to optimize their OS and software.

Really depends on what you’re trying to do. Done a few budget builds for folks who were attached to Windows but don’t multitask.

Someone who keeps their activities limited to one browser tab and one document/spreadsheet can get by just fine on 8GB.

Might seem very restrictive to most of us, especially here on Lemmy, but there are people who live their lives just like this.

Also, bit cheeky of Microsoft to do this right as they’re introducing new Surfaces with 8GB at what used to be the 16GB model’s price point, lol.

If you want to get the most of your hardware, Windows 11 is not the way.

This sounds like the same Vista requirements back in the day. Sure it "ran" on 512mb of RAM, but you sure as shit weren't doing anything else than looking at the desktop.

I'm old enough to remember when everyone generally agreed that using fewer resources is a good thing.

"admits" seems to indicate that it's true. I would never run a windows 10 machine on 8 gigs of ram let alone windows 11. It may boot but you will struggle to do anything worthwhile on it.

It's absolutely insane an OS has such re4quirements.
An OS is basically just a kernel with a shell on top for starting apps. Although the kernel of a modern OS is a technological marvel, it doesn't even require 1GB. The requirement should not be specified by the OS, but for what software is run on top of it.
On Linux you can Run a full fledged desktop, and a web browser and office pack on 2GB easy, and with 4GB even have breathing room, and even have 8 TTY's available just in case.

It could run on 8GB of RAM but that would require trimming out a lot of the shareholder-mandated bloat

I remember clearly when Gates had stated that "640K ought to be enough for anybody."

Fooled me once.

I can't even get the PC to not be using 95-100% ram on 16gb...

takes 10-15 minutes to be SOMEWHAT stable after a fresh boot.

it's a work pc so idgaf but there's NO WAY IN SHIT that 8gb will function.