[bagol]

It's neither bug nor human bug. It is a misconception of those who already familiar with windows, and most of new Linux users are come from windows.

Linux folks say that unused memory is not good, of course it is. Windows folks say that free memory is a good thing, and of course it is.

See? It actually is the same thing that being seen from different perspective.

[rbanffy]

> Linux folks say that unused memory is not good, of course it is.

30 or so years ago, while watching over a friend of mine's shoulder who was sitting at the gorgeous 3278-2 system console with the legendary beam-spring keyboard, looking into usage stats on an IBM 4381 mainframe, I noticed the CPU (I think it was only one on that machine, that occupied most of a floor) was pegged at 100% usage. When I asked if that was bad, he simply responded:

"Of course it's 100% used! We paid for it, we'd better use it!"

Later I understood that he'd probably be more concerned if the IO processors started to get saturated, but, by then, I was no longer using mainframes.

[Const-me]

> It actually is the same thing that being seen from different perspective

Absolutely, but these perspectives aren’t equally useful, it depends on the user and their use case.

The real low-level thing reported by Linux is a useful perspective for kernel developers, and maybe for students learning about virtual memory management in operating systems.

However, the fake data reported by Windows task manager is the useful perspective for everyone else. I think 99% of people using these tools are in this category.

[BenjiWiebe]

The task manager in KDE (Ksysguard) does show RAM usage like Windows task manager does.

So a new user clicking System Monitor will get a RAM graph they understand.