I guess RAM is a bell curve now.
- 32GB: Enough.
- 16GB: Not enough.
- 8GB: Not enough.
- 4GB: Believe it or not, enough.
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
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I actually audibly laughed when Raspberry Pi came out with an 8GB version because for anyone who thinks 4GB isn't enough probably won't be happy with 8 either.
I wonder what the hell they are doing with it? I mean I have the 3B with IIRC 1GB and I can use the desktop and run python scripts to fiddle with all the I/O ports and stuff, what do you do with a raspberry that needs eight times the RAM??
I'm seriously curious!
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I have experienced this myself.
My main machine at home - a M2 Pro MacBook with 32GB RAM - effortlessly runs whatever I throw at it. It completes heavy tasks in reasonable time such as Xcode builds and running local LLMs.
Work issued machine - an Intel MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM - struggles with Firefox and Slack. However, development takes place on a remote server via terminal, so I do not notice anything beyond the input latency.
A secondary machine at home - an HP 15 laptop from 2013 with an A8 APU and 8GB RAM (4GB OOTB) - feels sluggish at times with Linux Mint, but suffices for the occasional task of checking emails and web browsing by family.
A journaling and writing machine - a ThinkPad T43 from 2005 maxed out with 2GB RAM and Pentium M - runs Emacs snappily on FreeBSD.
There are a few older machines with acceptable usability that don't get taken out much, except for the infrequent bout of vintage gaming
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Have you even used Linux? 16GB of RAM is enough, even with electron apps
Not in my experience. The electron spotify app + electron discord app + games was too much. Replacing electron with dedicated FF instances worked tho.
About 6 months ago I upgraded my desktop from 16 to 48 gigs cause there were a few times I felt like I needed a bigger tmpfs.
Anyway, the other day I set up a simulation of this cluster I'm configuring, just kept piling up virtual machines without looking cause I knew I had all the ram I could need for them. Eventually I got curious and checked my usage, I had just only reached 16 gigs.
I think basically the only time I use more that the 16 gigs I had is when I fire up my GPU passthrough windows VM that I use for games, which isn't your typical usage.
I have a browser tab addiction problem, and I often run both LibreWolf and Firefox at the same time (reasons). I run discord all the time, signal, have a VTT going on, a game, YouTube playing… and I look at my RAM usage and wonder why did I buy so much when I can never reach 16 GB.
While I agree electron apps suck and I avoid them… Whatever you guys are running ain’t a typical use case.
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We used to say 4GB is enough. And before that, a couple hundred MB. I'm staying ahead from now on, so I threw in 64GB. That oughtta last me for another 3/4 of a decade. I'm tired of doing the upgrade race for 30 years and want to be set for a while.
I can literally trace my current Ryzen PC's lineage like the ship of Theseus to an Athlon system I built in 2002. A replacement GPU here. Replacement mobo there. CPU here, etc.
lightweight usage 
That doesn't mean anything. If you have tons of free RAM, programs tend to use more than strictly necessary because it speeds things up. That doesn't mean they won't run perfectly fine with 8GiB as well.
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Man i remember. I have 16GB And running windows I would run out of ram so fast. Now on linux, I feel like I am unable to push the usage beyond 8GB in my regular workflow. I also switched to neovim from vscode, Firefox from Chrome and now only when I compile rust does my ram see any usage peaks.
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I hate electron apps. Just make a website asshole, don't bundle a whole chrome browser! The only one I'll tolerate is ferdium, because having a message control center is kinda neat.
I want normal applications, that run on my computer I have at home!
hank hill jpeg meme.jpg
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Also, massive security surfaces.
Any music producer is familiar with 3rd party license managers like ilok that make you use their Shit-ass electron application that gets an update once every few years.
The fact that electron both exists and is one of the most popular cross-platform development frameworks tells you everything you need to know about the current potato'd state of software development.
The underlying issue is that nobody wants to develop using any of the available cross-platform toolkits that you can compile into native binaries without an entire browser attached. You could use Qt or GTK to build a cross-platform application. But if you use Electron, you can just run the same application on the browser AND as a standalone application.
Me? I'm considering developing my next application in Qt out of all things because it does actually have web support via WASM and I want to learn C++ and gain some Qt experience. Good idea? Probably not.
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It's like so many programmers never evolve past the "playing around with web dev stuff" days. The fact that JavaScript is one of the most used languages is appalling.
The whole 1+1 = 11 meme made me laugh and then avoid JavaScript whenever possible, but I wonder if many others saw it and thought, "now I've gained more experience in JavaScript!"
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Apple: Enough!
But you'll have to buy a whole new laptop when it turns out that was a lie.
I have no idea how people use so much RAM. I use a 16 GB machine for work and it runs perfectly. For the majority of the time I'm well below 8GB. And I do use Electron apps.
Of course, I'm aware of the possible uses demanding more than 16 GB but I can't believe this would be the case for a majority of the people.
The people who installed toolbars until half their screen was full are still around. Just now they keep 100 tabs open instead
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16gb and a number less than 16gb both not being big enough numbers is making me crack up
💪 32GB RAM
💵 64GB RAM
128 GB here which runs out if I compile the complete project at work with -j32. And this sucks because 128 GB right now means the RAM cannot run super fast, meaning it is a bottleneck to any modern Ryzen...
256GiB here, i sometimes need to run chrome
And you think that's enough?
I use separate hdd solely as swap for these cases, used 500gb laptop hdd is good enough if you turn zswap zstd compression on, with recent kernels using mglru it works splendidly
I only run out of ram (16GB) when I'm playing minecraft with 280 mods
The only time I can remember 16 GB not being sufficient for me is when I tried to run an LLM that required a tad more than 11 GB and I had just under 11 GB of memory available due to the other applications that were running.
I guess my usage is relatively lightweight. A browser with a maximum of about 100 open tabs, a terminal, a couple of other applications (some of them electron based) and sometimes a VM that I allocate maybe 4 GB to or something. And the occasional Age of Empires II DE, which even runs fine on my other laptop from 2016 with 16 GB of RAM in it. I still ordered 32 GB so I can play around with local LLMs a bit more.
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I don't know. I'm running 16gb with 8gb of swap just fine.
Couple dozen tabs open in librewolf (across multiple windows), android studio with an emulator and some other utils. All under KDE Plasma on nixos unstable and it's fine. It could be better, but it's good enough.
zram to the rescue
I was happy with 16GB until i inherited a huge Angular legacy project.
At least 8 is better than 4
I retired my 4gb/120gb/celeron ThinkPad 11e today, since I've got a more powerful laptop lying around and I've used it for 8 years nonstop. It used to freeze up occasionally when there were more than 4 Firefox tabs open, and not to mention, my obsession with GNOME causing a shortage of system resources.
Man that ThinkPad felt like family, I'm gonna miss using it.
You could always put it into service as a network wide ad blocker with PiHole. Might also speed up web browsing a bit too, since PiHole also works as a DNS cache.
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I remember all the windows users saying 16gb of ram is enough
The most ram i ever used on my current system is prolly about 6gb. Most of the times its around 2-3gb most of it being system stuff and librefox. I have 16gb if i ever need it for some reason.
Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping
2TB NVME dedicated entirely to virtual memory
I think someone needs to update that old "if programming languages were weapons". JavaScript is a cursed hammer.
8GB is enough for me, but my laptop usually only has GNOME, Orca, and Cinny running.
This is currently me with modded Kerbal Space Program and Cities: Skylines lol
I use 8gb ram and it worked for everything except running stable diffusion yet
I am running 8 gigs on my piece of shit laptop, and i just have to make sure not to open minecraft and the browser at once, otherwise it's absolutely fine
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