MacBooks don't need as much ram - I have an m1 air with 8gb of ram and it's perfectly serviceable, I can even run IntelliJ on it...

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cromka 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I never run out of memory on macoOS on my M1 Air 16GB. Now that I use Asahi on it, I had plenty of OoM crashes.

macOS is really good at memory management, including the compression and offloading to the fast SSD.

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mixmastamyk 4 hours ago | parent [-]

You have a buggy program. Zswap has been available for quite a while.

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cromka an hour ago | parent | next [-]

>You have a buggy program.

As in memory leak? No.

> Zswap has been available for quite a while.

Zsawp is not Zram, which is a distant relative of the macOS on-the-fly compression I was talking about. Zram is buggy and still advised against regular use (https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/1i3mdrw/comment..., https://chrisdown.name/2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-...). Zsawp itself is enabled by default in Asahi.

Zram and Zsawp are mutually exclusive on Linux. On macOS, both concepts coexist – except macOS is able to compress individual memory pages (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38300432) on the fly. Zram is a compressed RAM block device with a hard capacity limit.

There is really no comparison here at this point. macOS is vastly superior in that regard.

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baq 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm yet to see a linux distro with memory configured correctly out of the box. (I haven't looked too hard, but the defaults are abysmal.)

	▲	cromka an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Still can't help the fact memory management on macOS is vastly better with its use of pages compression and unlimited swap.

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mixmastamyk 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Compared to what? Not really true, and hard on the swap drive. Penny-wise meet pound.

	▲	slopinthebag 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well it's still kicking just fine years later, shrug