What you’re refering to as Windows, is in fact, GNU/Windows, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Windows. Windows is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another closed component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called “Windows”, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Windows, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Windows is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Windows is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Windows added, or GNU/Windows. All the so-called “Windows” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Windows.
Hmm with modern games like BG3 you might run into some limitations with 16GB. Online I'm reading that BG3 uses 25GB of RAM. Might be that the few MB a DE uses are just enough to kick something important into the swap file or something.
I don't think that's it, I just checked out and the game only takes around 25-26% ram and it was running reasonably well with 4,5gb ram already taken. that 25gb ram sounds like someone is playing the game with 4k graphics or something. bg 3 lists only 8gb ram as mimimum requirement and 16gb is recommended
edit: I don't know if gnome takes up some grpahics card or cpu resources which affect the game performance since it's a lot bigger program than i3wm
I see, then it shouldn't be the RAM.
I've used gnome on a relatively new machine and it seemed like it was working fine. Maybe I just didn't notice the performance hit, or maybe it's the same with KDE. Definitely odd though.
yeah it's quite odd. but at least I want to use i3wm anyways so it doesnt really matter