I was running mint with 4gb with steam and signal on background as well as Firefox with 2 tabs open. Not perfect but definitely usable

You can really download more ram if you use cloud storage as swap

Hey, unused memory is wasted memory

every chat app needs over a gig of ram to itself for "developer productivity"

Many people who don't know what they're talking about in this thread. No, used memory does not include cached memory. You can confirm this trivially by running free -m and adding up the numbers (used + cached + free = total). Used memory can not be reclaimed until the process holding it frees it or dies. Not all cached memory can be reclaimed either, which is why the kernel reports an estimate of available memory. That's the number that really matters, because aside from some edges cases that's the number that determines whether you're out of memory or not.

Anyway the fact that you can't run Linux with 16GB is weird and indicates that some software you are using has a RAM leak (a Firefox extension perhaps?). Firefox will use memory if it's there but it's designed to cope with low memory as well, it just unloads tabs quicker so you have to reload often. There are also extensions that make tab unloading more aggressive, maybe that would help - especially if there's memory pressure from other processes too.

Solution: if you only have 4GB ram, nothing can use more than 4GB

I got surprised like two days ago when I got a desktop notification that Linux kernel killed a process, because there was no memory available, or something like that. I didn't know it can do that, lol.

every chat app might use ~1GB because most of them are electron apps, which all spawn their own instance of chromium

It's already been explained elsewhere, but the cache can be free, as needed - that's how linux works.
There's 57+ GB available ram, yet.

many Linux distros are optimized to use as much available RAM as possible, free RAM is wasted RAM

Most would still run with a lot less anyway

https://www.linuxatemyram.com/

Electron apps are bullshit though.

Does it mean 35.1 GB out of the 44.3 GB is actually cached? Then you have quite low actual RAM usage considering you have 67 GB.

I have a memory consumption issue with Ubuntu, because I stupidly set up the system to have 0 swap. This means under high memory pressure, the entire system could suddenly crash.

To be fair, Windows isn't a shining beacon either because whenever I attempt something very GPU intensive like running local LLMs the GPU overheats in a split second before the fans have time to spin up and the entire system shuts down.

Don't be confused by cached ram, be confused by the oom killer activating while you have plenty of swap and for some reason it kills the shell you ran Firefox from.

If you want to go on a memory allocation adventure try disabling memory overcommit 🥲

~19 Gb firefox

Tf you doing

oh i see you're also using a single tab for youtube and no other tabs

Most RAM Linux reports as in used is actually used as disc cache to speed up the IO.