> You don't have to have assets loaded in RAM and also VRAM for the CPU/GPU to use them.
You typically don't want to do this anyway in games. You're probably doing something wrong if you're reading textures/meshes on both the CPU and GPU.
> Don't forget about how much more RAM a general purpose OS like Steam OS can consume versus a gaming specific OS too.
SteamOS is meant to be a gaming specific OS first. It has a desktop environment but none of that loads unless you switch to desktop mode. That's just taking up some disk space while you play games.
>SteamOS is meant to be a gaming specific OS first. It has a desktop environment but none of that loads unless you switch to desktop mode.
I think it's fair for some of us to consider the resource usage of a core feature and not really accept "just don't use desktop mode" as a viable suggestion. Especially if half the pitch is "it's a mobile PC." You can't use many of the features it's capable of in gaming mode.
It's not "don't use desktop mode", it's "switch back to gaming mode before playing a game".
On any 16GB machine you're going to want to close your any ram heavy apps like browsers before starting a game. Switching to gaming mode is an easy way to do that.
> You can't use many of the features it's capable of in gaming mode
It is trivial to switch between gaming mode and desktop mode. I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here.