Those machines are already mostly unusable under Windows because MS only requires 2GiB minimum so it's an instant swapfest to eMMC. Put Linux on them and they're quite nice.
I disagree - I have one with a quad core atom, 1GB of ram(!!!) And latest windows 10 1903 edition runs very nicely on it if you stick to the built-in apps. I usually have it next to my main PC as an additional monitor with the wireless projector functionality .
Windows 10 runs very nicely... If you only want to use the machine as an external monitor? Respectfully, this doesn't seem like a very realistic use case for most people.
That's not what I said. I said it runs really nicely if you stick to the built-in apps, and that I use mine as an external monitor. Those two are not mutually exclusive.
I'll hazard a guess that your Win10 machine on 1GB RAM is swapping plenty. A lightweight Linux distribution can run a reasonable desktop workload (including some web browsing!) on 1GB with zilch swap use, or on as little as 512MB with tolerable use of swap. It's a bit disappointing in a way, but Linux (and not even every Linux distro, for that matter) is the only OS where I can visibly tell that I'm running something reasonably bloat-free, and it makes the UX incredibly snappy and comfortable all-around.
No, Windows did not eat your RAM. Your "guess" would be wrong. I've installed Win 10 to 1GB VM machines many times. The OS itself takes a little over 512 of RAM in this scenario. No swapping at all if your not using any apps more than 512MB.
The reason you probably are assuming Win 10 is unusable is that on your 8 or 16GB machine Windows uses free RAM to speed things up. It's is smart enough to not do this on memory constraints setups.
Funny thing is Linux users often made this same mistake with "free -m", hence the need for this site: https://www.linuxatemyram.com/
I've had to install and run Windows Server 2016 on an XP-era desktop with 256MB RAM... oh it was painful, agonisingly painful, with constant swapping. But it worked!
Well, i'm here to say that if you use a normal linux distro with KDE or Gnome your going to be in the multiple GB's of ram pretty quick. Sure you can have a stripped down linux distro with X/lxde or whatever in under 1GB, but you can also use windows IoT or Core for much the same effect.
The problem is that MS (and the mainstream linux DE's) aren't willing to admit that some of the "modernization" they have done over the last decade has done nothing but increase the visual lag while massively increasing the resource consumption for what is frequently little more than transparent windows (cause high DPI is still not quite there in both cases...).
