I was playing around with an old laptop dual booting Fedora KDE and W11. And Fedora on fresh boot was using the same/more ram than 11.

Windows compresses RAM these days, not sure if Fedora does by default. Also, by itself Windows is surprisingly RAM efficient. I think it’s a holdover from Windows 8 which was developed for tablets when Microsoft tried competing with iPads.

The problems arise when web views like the news widget load. Then all the past optimizations no longer matter.