Using win 11 with 8gb of ram should be the sentence for nonviolent crimes
Then how about Lenovo for 4GB laptop with integrated?
Cruel and unusual
There are laws against cruel and unusual punishment.
Sadly, not unusual enough
I have both Windows 11 and Linux mint on the same PC with 8 GB of RAM. I use it for making slides, research, watching videos, internet browsing and gaming (valorant, counter strike). Windows 11 isn’t unusable at all with 8GB of RAM. It really depends on what your use case is, also depends on the amount of bloatware you have
booting the computer is the use case for the surface l… lol, that’s about all you’re gonna do with 8gb
Is it really that unusable? I hate windows 11 as much as the next guy, but on the other hand, my parents both use windows 11 on an 8gb system and they haven’t had any complaints. Granted they pretty much only do things in a webbrowser.
If you do anything heavier than just a browser, you’re gonna have issues. I had a bunch of users on 8gb laptops one upon a time. If they tried to run excel, outlook, and chrome at the same time their systems would run like it was 2003.
I doubt that web browsing is good either with how modern web apps are built. But regular people might not even realize that something is wrong.
Yeah that doesn’t surprise me, especially with how much ram windows 11 needs just to run without anything open. So far 8 gigs still seems to work fine for their usecase, and i didn’t really notice any bottlenecks whenever i was troubleshooting on their machines either. If anything the cpu ended up being more of an issue, the oldest of the 2 had a ryzen 2200g in it, and i noticed it would often spike up to 100% in task manager without doing much. I had to upgrade it anyway since windows 11 required a newer cpu for secure boot, so i put a 3400g in it and now it runs smooth again, still with 8 gigs of ram.
I think they changed the frequency adjusting algorithm under the hood with 11. It seems to be much more sluggish on bumping core clock frequency up when a big task happens. I had to go in and lock the minimum frequency to 100% on a bunch of user laptops because they would stutter so badly any time they went from low to high CPU usage.
Sometimes I miss being a sysadmin, then I remember dealing with windows 11’s eccentricities.
They never change. I used to repair laptops for a well known laptop brand, this was around the release of Windows Vista, 2006 or so.
We were getting a lot of warranty repairs where the issue was “laptop slow” or words to that effect. The only issue with them was that they didn’t have enough ram to run Vista smoothly enough. The whole system chugged. But as there was nothing wrong with the laptops, we’d send them back to the customer largely untouched saying “buy more ram.”
At some point, a couple of suits from the company came to look around the warehouse and meet the team. I was primary diagnostic at this point, so I would inspect most of the laptops and confirm their issues. I was getting around 15 laptops a day at this point that were just low ram for Vista, so I asked the suits “why do we sell laptops with Vista that can’t run it properly as they don’t have enough ram?”
His response was that “Microsoft sets the specs of the laptops. Nothing we can do.”
Ah, Vista. My “ready for Vista” laptop finally convinced me to try out this Ubuntu Linux people were talking about, and although I dual booted for a few years, by 2009 I never had Windows on one of my own devices again.
The Vista rollout was so bad.
My workplace got a bunch of new laptops that didn’t have Vista-compatible sound card drivers.
“Microsoft sets the specs of the laptops. Nothing we can do.”
Then… Send them physically to Microsoft service Center?
Microsoft doesn’t set the spec; the manufacturer can always add more spec if they want to!
But what Microsoft does (did?) do is to provide extremely cheap OEM Windows licenses to vendors who made laptops with a certain maximum spec - that spec for a long time being 4GB RAM max and 14" screen max.
That’s why all the cheap brand-new Windows laptops you saw on the market were basically the same identical crap with the same shit specs.
Tbf, the 4GB ram limit was partially due to 32-bit architecture still being so prevalent at the time
Maybe, but what it was mainly was market segregation in Windows licensing.
Microsoft wants even the cheapest lowest-end devices to ship with Windows because that improves their market penetration, but at the same time they don’t want to lose money by reducing the price OEMs pay for Windows licenses in general.
So Microsoft basically told manufacturers “Okay we’ll give you super cheap licenses to keep your cost down so you can sell to the budget market, but only on super bottom-end devices. On more expensive machines you’ll still pay the full license price”
Which basically resulted in manufacturers all trying to squeeze the most mileage out of that spec cap they could.
$1300 for a computer that will be able to do nothing but choke on its own face. Great job, world at large, great fucking job.
This statement is fundamentally wrong. Asking enterprise users to settle for 8GB of memory in a premium $1,299 machine in 2026 is the definition of trading off performance and will tarnish the Surface brand’s reputation for long-term reliability.
In what world are surfaces reliable? All I hear from people who get them from work are what absolute pieces of shit these things are.
My surface pro is okay whenever I have to take a windows laptop to a job site. The unreliability comes from Windows 11, but the hardware has been fine.
Hell you can have an overspec’d gaming PC and Windows still sucks the life out of it.
No, I am talking about the hardware. At least 4 seperate people I’ve spoken to had nothing but issues with work assigned surfaces. At least a cursory google turned up a few threads with similar sentiments.
Work assigned laptops are usually treated very poorly and die early.
Surfaces have pretty solid hardware (repairablity like is like Mac’s) and they work pretty well with Linux.
Your experience is still anecdotal and moot.
Hell you can have an overspec’d gaming PC and Windows still sucks the life out of it.
Never heard of such a thing? Care to elaborate?
Not that I’m defending Windows, it’s a POS
I use a Surface Pro 9, I bought it new specifically to install Linux on it.
Uninstalled Windows 11 one hour after it’s first bootup and installed Fedora on it, and I am pretty sure most of it’s problems are caused by Windows. On Linux, it is stone cold and dead silent when I am browsing the web, editing text, programming etc. I get about 6 hours of freedom when I got VSCodium and some browser windows open.
For sub 5 minute multicore workloads, the metal case eats all that heat up fairly quickly and I can say the device has very good thermal design. Though it does heat up to “hurts to touch” temperatures when I got hour long heavy workloads like compiling the linux kernel, I did expect that because it is an Intel after all.
I don’t really mind overheating since I don’t hold the device in my hands when I am compiling a giant project, what matters is that it doesn’t heat up in my hands when I am watching movies and stuff.
Plus; my favourite desktop GNOME is wonderful on touchscreens, I love their HIG, it is so comfortable. I can’t imagine the poor souls having to navigate Windows UI on a touchscreen.
I’ve bought a Surface Go 2 a few years back and the startup time has steadily risen from a poor ~2min to well over 5min. But ever since I’ve deactivated secure boot and installed Debian with Plasma, it’s become my beloved workhorse with a boot time of <1min after entering the LVM key.
Surfaces are great hardware for the (old) price. A pity hardware’s becoming unaffordable…
You mean with Windows?
From my favorite e-waste retailer I saw that the pricing of surface go 2 and 3 is enticing and I wanted to try them - but with Linux. With Linux is usable, right? Plasma can recognize tablet mode automatically?
What what other people in this thread are saying, Linux on a surface is really solid.
I do mean with Linux. I bought it with Widows on and eventually put Debian on it. KDE Plasma already does a wonderful tablet mode out of the box and it’s getting better. The stylus isn’t all that reliable yet.
At my last job while doing a lot of win 11 computer replacements, I managed to snag a couple of laptops that were going to be ewasted. One I keot for myself was an early surface. SSD and RAM are soildered to the motherboard so no upgrade or replacement path. Runs warm and the cpu is kinda trash.
Whatever, free computer is free and running mint its usually fine.
Soldered computer components shouldn’t even exist. There are way more downsides with it than up sides - of course it might be faster, but what’s the point if in a year or 2 the capacity will be insufficient. What do you do then? Toss it in the trash?
Honestly, we are going technologically behind. Rather than making proper standards for modularity, they rather make up dozen of excuses of how soldered is actually superior.
Same thing in automotive industry tbh. No fucking reason why every vehicle a lineup doesn’t share modules.
What do you do then? Toss it in the trash?
Toss it in the trash and buy a new one.
Now ask yourself again why hardware manufacturers love doing that…
I also have a MS Surface I’d love to put Linux on, but from my last research it needs a custom kernel to work.
They are trash like any other laptop as thin and unventilated as that.
They are trash like any other laptop as thin and unventilated as that.
I mean, it depends on what you’re using a laptop for.
Like you, I have pretty consistently also pointed out, when people talk about, say, doing heavy LLM crunching on laptops, that the form factor just is not great for heat dissipation or using a lot of power.
But, I mean, that’s not everything that people do on a laptop. I’m writing a comment on a Lemmy Web page right now. That’s not a terribly compute-intensive task.
Honestly, what irks me more about thin laptops is that they invariably have limited battery size. I’d be quite happier with a thicker laptop if it meant 100 Wh batteries, but most laptop vendors have smaller batteries. Lithium batteries are a lot cheaper in 2026 than they were some decades back. A lot of laptops ship with something like a 50Wh battery. Sure, it’s great to shave down cost, and a lot of consumers don’t think about battery life when buying a laptop, but in 2026, it’s less than ten cents per watt-hour for lithium-ion cells. From my perspective, the return here is just not great.
Yeah, we’ve also generally improved power efficiency, and USB PD is a thing, so you can carry powerstations, but I’d rather have a laptop that knows how much time it has left and don’t need to haul out an external battery and eat up a USB-C port. And you can always do something useful with laptop battery life. Brighter screens. More USB-connected devices. Degrading your battery less over time by not completely charging and discharging it. More fan cooling, more CPU capability, more GPU capability. The only people who don’t get anything out of more battery are people who always use their laptop as a portable desktop, never use it unless it’s plugged into wall power.
There’s some weight argument, maybe, but if that’s what you want, back when lithium batteries were more expensive, a number of laptop vendors used to provide the option of smaller batteries, often shipping laptops with an option of a smaller battery or a larger (more expensive) one. That could still be done today, and if you have a smaller battery, the laptop is lighter.
I can maybe understand someone arguing some thinness benefits from an ergonomic standpoint, but…desktop keyboards are almost always thicker than laptops. Desktop touchpads that I’ve seen generally are as well. If, given a situation where you don’t have size constraints for actual usage, users choose thicker devices, it’s hard for me to see the ergonomics argument for a laptop form factor.
In general a mobile device should not be running windows
Should not be used for heavy lifting
Should not be a desktop drop-in replacement
Should not be expensive. Or at least, not THAT expensive.
It still baffles my mind that I can use an android phone docked to a keyboard, mouse, and monitor, and have a better experience on the go than using a laptop that costs 3 times as much as that entire setup. People have done this on YouTube, it’s a great watch.
The issue imho is that consumers that buy laptops have no idea what they are buying so companies can get away with pretty much anything. If it turns on and runs chrome and excel the user is happy to spend $1500… For some stupid reason…
I have a 2020 surface laptop that’s still performing admirably. I’ve been consistently using it the entire time and have seen no drop in performance, even after updating to Windows 11. Though I don’t use copilot, or many Windows apps for that matter…
Surface Pro owner. Can confirm - worst computer I’ve owned. Gets hot to the touch when you open Notepad.
Holy shit, they launched a new 4 gig machine in 2022‽
640kb ought to be enough for anybody
I just run my OS directly off my 5.25” floppy
Everything on a computer is just fancy word processing. Who needs more than a text editor?
I am NOT giving up my Comic Sans!
I recently got my Casio watch to save 25 phone numbers! And it’s a calculator!
Bro’s an AntiX enthusiast. lol
I find it strange how unwilling Microsoft is to be price competitive with Apple. It really shouldn’t be that difficult to price comparably to apple
Apple spent decades perfecting their hardware production while Microsoft relied on third party sellers to create devices that would run Windows. Why would you expect their hardware to be comparable at this point? They’re primarily a software company and their software is also bad
I don’t think third party hardware is even a good excuse for Microsoft. Like sure, they’re working with third parties on hardware for the most part, but most of the manufacturers are targeting their software.
Meanwhile most linux distros and desktops will run fine on 4 gigs, and they’re doing most of the work to get their stuff compatible with the hard wear.
Even when Apple was running on intel chips, they were still way better about resource usage than Microsoft was.
I think Microsoft is just… really bad at making an OS because they’ve been coasting on being the default for so long that they didn’t have to care about optimization, manufacturers were just obligated to target what ever bloat-wear they put out.
In the current environment? Apple shielded itself from price hikes by component suppliers by locking up capacity early. There’s a reason why their CEO came up through the supply chain rather than software or design.
The memory Apple is putting in its devices today are largely priced at prices negotiated years ago. It got deals on CPUs and GPUs of their own design, fabricated by TSMC, packaged with Samsung-fabricated memory in System-in-a-Package form, at volumes that make them nearly impossible to say no to, under contracts that are probably bulletproof even as TSMC and Samsung have others clamoring for their capacity at higher prices.
The A18 Pro in the MacBook Neos is made on TSMC’s N3E node, which started production in 2023 and was probably under contract by 2022. The AI boom largely started happening after, and the memory/storage chip crunch didn’t seem like it would be a problem until 2024 or so.
In an environment like this where there are capacity shortages and companies bidding up the price to absurd levels, companies like Apple are exactly who you’d expect not to be thrown around by price hikes.
I see your point there, but Surface’s have been priced higher than Mac’s for many years now (and typically for more outdated hardware), before the AI bubble destroyed memory pricing
no worries… I’ve replaced more microslop surface hardware then I have sold. I refuse to sell em… nothing but ewaste in 6-8 months with some of the most HORRENDOUS support imaginable because… microsoft
I really like my surface pros, have a 2016 one that still runs great even though the battery is starting to bulge a bit. My mom got a non-pro and had lots of issues.
Yikes you do know a bulging battery is a fire risk right?
This. That battery is a fire risk to any home its in.
I know not every bulging barrery is seconds from catching fire…but it’s just no worth the risk.
I know someone that lost a family member in a house fire started by failing lithium batteries in a hoverboard.
I didn’t know! What’s the best way to dispose of it?
Greedy cunt fucks gotta greedy cunt fuck.
Meanwhile, my old Linux laptop is chugging along quite happily with 2GB.
That’s actually…impressive
What do you typically use it for though? My PC is central to the media I consume, the games I play and as a creative outlet. I don’t think I’d be able to use most of the tools I enjoy with such little memory.
It’s not my main workstation or gaming PC, which is probably why 2GB is plenty comfortable enough.
Light web browsing, printing stuff, word processing, running presentations at my writer’s group, occasionally running a Game Boy emulator or playing a video … never anything particularly demanding. I only use it when I need the portability, because otherwise why would I want to do things hunched over a tiny laptop?
All very light uses, sure … but for that kind of stuff, it does great. Feels responsive and snappy pretty much all the time, despite being a shitty old Chromebook from 2016.
What Distro are you using? Because I’m looking for a light weight distro that I can install on cheap laptops. I assume with 2gb it must be fairly light.
Most distros are fairly light weight by default, it’s the desktop environment that will be the deciding factor. Someone else said they were running Debian with XFCE on a 2 gig system.
There are other lightweight desktops but XFCE is quite good.
But you might not even need that unless it’s a really old or really low spec laptop. I’ve got a 2012 MacBook Pro with 4 gigs of ram running Arch with KDE plasma and it’s quite snappy. Although, it did run out of memory once when I tried compiling a browser from the AUR.
Thanks for all the info! I’ll have a look into xfce.
Gallium OS with XFCE.
I’d only recommend it for chromebooks specifically, though.
Which distro/setup do you use? I tried loads on my old 4GB macbook air and they were all dog-slow unfortunately.
Gallium OS (now defunct, sadly), with a somewhat outdated version of XFCE.
I know, I know. It would be better if I was using a more updated Linux version, and some of the stuff on it is horrifyingly outdated. (I forget what kernel it’s on, but the version number starts with a 4.) But while Gallium OS is no longer maintained and updated, I still want to use it for the old Chromebook because it has a custom-altered kernel that plays especially nice with Chromebook hardware. It runs very efficiently (17+ hours of battery life), and all the weird Chromebook hardware quirks work flawlessly out of the box. So far, it hasn’t caused me any issues*, and I’ll keep using it like this as long as it remains issue-free.
*The one issue I’ve had from the outdated OS is that I haven’t been able to install FadeIn for Linux. It requires a more recent kernel version than Gallium ships with, and I can’t update Gallium’s kernel without losing the unique features that make it run well on Chromebook hardware.
If anybody ever makes a successor to Gallium OS optimized for Chromebook hardware but using modern, updated Linux packages, I’d love to know about it!
Judging from my experience here, I’d recommend looking into it and seeing if you can find any distros that are especially tailored to old Apple hardware. If such a thing exists, I bet you’ll get much better results with it.
Thank you for taking the time for such a detailed response. My MacBook got a frustrated toss in to a skip unfortunately, as it had a duff battery and the hinges were loose. I was asking for my next (unavoidable) project, as low spec hardware always seems to come along and find me!
I think FydeOS is like Gallium: https://fydeos.io/
But I see Gallium was built on Xubuntu, so presumably Xubuntu should also just work for you.
Otherwise, Peppermint and Puppy Linux are message for older low ram devices as well, and lastly, if you haven’t already, you might want to look into mrchromebox:
Alternatives like that are what I’d probably go to if I had no other choice and needed an updated system, sure.
But none of those have the chromebook-specific kernel tweaks that make Gallium work so well on Chromebooks. In any other distro, I’d probably have issues with the weird Chromebook-specific buttons not working, the weird chromebook-specific touchpad not working, perhaps some other hardware (like audio) not working, and I’d lose the optimizations that make it run quick and efficient on the quirky hardware.
I mean, Fyde was originally meant for Chromebooks, and has support for Intel devices back to 2010 I think.
It sounds like you’re talking about drivers?
Otherwise, if you do want essentially an updated Gallium, there’s this guide which is on running Xubuntu (again, what Gallium used as it’s base) on old Chromebook:
https://www.quantulum.co.uk/blog/xubuntu-on-a-chromebook/
It shows how to tweak things as needed.
I could maybe find more specific details if I knew what specific Chromebook you had.
Mr.Chromebox also makes it so you can run other distros by installing the firmware needed for your Chromebook so you shouldn’t have issues with any buttons etc. Which should be a replacement for the custom kernel tweaks Gallium did manually. I don’t know how far back they go though, since you mentioned it’s a 2gb ram machine.
Same here. My Debian xfce consumes around 2GB …I don’t do anything fancy, most work stuff, email and web browsing.
Heh… My old laptops usage rarely creeps above 1GB. With only 2GB available, I’d be in trouble if it was using all 2GB.
Microsoft jumped the shark a while ago. They are more into selling shit any way they can, rather than doing progressive development.
Now you can have a slow computer that dies in exactly 6 months.
That’s alright, you can just buy another one!
Laughs in MacBook neo (which is surprisingly CHEAPER than this?)
Yah, Apple is hungry and coming to eat Microsoft’s lunch.
Its so tempting to get one, they seem really legit
They are and it’s easy to mod them to improve cooling and increase performance as well.
clearly they’ve optimized their software, right?
Optimized for slop.
Sloptimized!
I’ve been looking up used laptops lately.
I can get a lenovo carbon from 7-8 years ago with 16Gb RAM for 200€.
About 6 months ago I scored a ThinkPad X1 Yoga 3rd Gen (2018) with 16GB RAM on eBay for £80 (~$110)
I was extremely happy with that catch.
Used business machines beat the pants off new consumer stuff any day.
I never really considered it outside of the TPM nonsense, but I bet the ram crisis will be responsible for a chunk of people putting Linux on their windows machines.
I just converted an old laptop last night to try it out. But it’s more due to every windows update breaking something more so than the ram, but yes my 16 gig system is already struggling in games and I don’t need the extra bloat anyway.
I beat the rush by a couple months. I have a i7-6700 in a HPz240 SFF that is clearly faster than some of the Celeron / i3 units that were OK’d by MS and the EOS for Win10 pushed me to Linux. Works well. I have 32GB of RAM in this machine, so it’s likely to last quite a few more years before it really becomes too slow for Linux.
I was happy with my 16gb until I went to make a small edit to something in Starfield and saw the system requirements for the toolset needs 32gb just to load the core game’s master files. Without even trying to open the 3D graphical view of a map cell or any DLC esms, it easily takes 12-14gb just to have the damn .esm loaded in.
Microsoft can fuck right off! Thank you very much.
