Also, embedded devices has nothing to do with this. We are talking about machines with gigs of ram and multiple gigahert processors. A little waste is fine.
Unlike the environment I code for at work, with a 100mhz processor, 16x128kb of flash, and 16x8kb of SRAM. There, I make every bit count, the 4gbs of ram in my personal computer can handle a little bloat.
And even with that, before I switched to vista I had XP running on less than 32mb commited ram when idle, without sacrificing functionality, and like I said, I would have gotten more than a year uptime if it wasn't for power outages and random self-initiated restarts due to moving the location of my computer and whatnot.
In addition, as the OP stated, it is much harder to find good software for linux than it is windows, and if you dispute that you are indeed a self dillusional moron.
I have a buddy at University of Sask who's doing his physics PhD. All their grad students, doctoral students, profs and labs use linux. For what software, I have no idea, but no one runs windows (few run OSX).
