How did google manage to make a version of linux more bloated than windows? It’s almost impressive.
For the same reason turning off a screen in Android works in less than a second and doesn’t drain your battery in half an hour while modern standby still barely works in Linux: optimisations.
Android is made to cache and freeze processes when switching apps. The more RAM you have, the more apps can have ready to go in an instant. When an app gets swapped out to storage, it’s very clearly noticeable, and many apps don’t bother to store state either. The Android approach to slick multitasking is to open as many applications as can fit in RAM, which is why apps launch faster than many Linux applications, even on much faster SSDs.
RAM really isn’t that expensive, and the power savings of rarely ever initialising applications is worth it.
while modern standby still barely works in Linux: optimisations.
Steam Deck likes to have a word
The Steam Deck does sleep very well, but as far as I know, it doesn’t do low-power background stuff while in sleep mode (Android does this for notifications, Windows will try to download updates, etc.).
I think the Deck uses classic S3 sleep rather than S0ix sleep.
Tbf the high ram usage wouldnt be a problem if it cached processes in it and used it to save battery but its just pure bloat. I think phones should have a coprocessor that handles notifications like what smartwatches do and that basically free battery. But android is also bloated because apps take a very long time to launch because of the jvm and java (thats what i heard at least, idk if this is actually why its slow) so everything is just left active. Also i think android strayed too far from linux, its basically just a worse version with a mobile ui and the support of a country sized company.
Only?
They have 16GB of RAM physically, 3GB is reserved for AI. So yeah, only 13GB is usable by regular apps, even if you don’t care about any of the AI stuff.
So then why does it have 16GB?
Have you noticed how expensive these things have gotten? Doesn’t it seems like charging you for more RAM than it necessary and then locking 20% of it away for “features” no one wants is a bad thing?
It’s not about a single app, it’s about multitasking without having to reload apps.
At various times I’ve juggled between 4 apps at once on my phone. Say something like Messaging, Firefox, maybe a lemmy app, and Bitwarden for logging into something.
Adding to what others said it is beneficial to load an app from RAM.
- Loads faster for user convenience
- Lower power usage so you’ll have better battery life
- More RAM reduces disk writes for cache / temporary files / from cold started apps that could write to storage.
If this is enabled by default it’ll certainly be needed, especially in cases like multitasking.
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2024/08/adding-16-kb-page-size-to-android.html?m=1
Sure about that?
https://fedia.io/m/android@lemdro.id/t/1119259/Tested-Google-s-Pixel-9-Pro-models-only-have-13GB-RAM/comment/6949769#entry-comment-6949769
Only? I have just 8 GB RAM on My PC.
And Android device which I am using to comment this have just 2GB RAM.
Chrome casually using 8gbs with a few tabs open. Also windows 11. I got a school laptop and windows uses 5gb out of the box💀. Linux supremacy.
Chrome using 8gbs ram is not necessarily a bad thing
Usually browsers use a lot because nothing else is using the ram. If you had a separate program running, the browser would stop using as much.
Your OS is not necessarily using those 8gb, it just reserved them, meaning other apps can still use it
Not a big deal.
Wait until you find out how much ram gets wasted in caching and algorithms designed to run faster on computers or improve productivity. Even things like indexing to speed up search or icon caching
It’s a mobile phone. 13gb is lots, and I’d be curious to see the extent that ai improves productivity.
The headline is designed explicitly to bait arguments
