Technology
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RAM usage is RAM usage, and besides the allocation still being awful and you probably having less RAM available in a heavy task, this means substantial power consumption, that costs money.
You can think that it's normal to do a bunch of things that threaten the system stability to get an OS that barely pretends it's not spying on you anymore. I do not think it's. I don't think it's normal to have to disable advertising on a paid system, but to each their own "¯_(ツ)_/¯".
Windows has been doing prefetching and caching all the way from 7 but even more so since 10. Also since 10 it does memory compression too.
Unused RAM is wasted RAM. Even if it's just the OS keeping apps on memory for faster launches. If you do need heavy RAM for a task your OS is clever enough to reshuffle things.
Used RAM does use more electricity but that is so neglible it's a non-issue and no argument.
Of my 32 GB at least 26 GB are constantly in use.
The problem is that when it is relocated, processor consumption increases. And as matter of fact, my operating system doesn't cache anything and still opens applications very quickly, even faster than Windows.
Maybe isn't a issue to you but for anyone with a laptop it is and it's pretty visible.
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What processor are you using, a 486? Memory management should be effectively instant on any modern platform.
I also find it extremely hard to believe that your unspecified OS doesn't do any caching. Even vxworks does caching.