But then they turn around and burn 100x (or more) the cycles-at-idle of 90s operating systems and constantly hit disk for no clear reason despite all this supposed performance-enhancing caching (try using Vista or newer on spinning rust—it's very clear that they're constantly doing disk I/O for normal shit like opening the start menu or just mousing over some UI elements, so much for "smart" caching of frequently-used things at boot).
I absolutely do not think intelligent caching is behind enough of the increased memory use to absolve them of all the waste. I don't believe Microsoft are being more respectful of memory than they are of other system resources. It also fails to explain the huge increase in memory footprint of Linux desktop environments and window managers. I don't think XFCE is caching your most-used "apps" in memory at launch.
I absolutely do not think intelligent caching is behind enough of the increased memory use to absolve them of all the waste. I don't believe Microsoft are being more respectful of memory than they are of other system resources. It also fails to explain the huge increase in memory footprint of Linux desktop environments and window managers. I don't think XFCE is caching your most-used "apps" in memory at launch.