Ever since Windows 7.

TL;DR: to spy on you.

I was kind of humbled to see how much less ressources Debian was using.
It needed one GB of memory after install in full memory.

Meanwhile Canonical
https://www.techpowerup.com/347967/ubuntu-26-04-lts-raises-recommended-memory-requirement-to-6-gb?cp=2

Right?! I have a debian NAS running openmediavault, it has music streaming and samba network shares. it only has 256MB RAM and doesn't even use all that.

it shouldn't. the problem really boils down to devs for stuff that aren't optimizing anything.

For example I'm currently using a basic build Fedora 44 with Niri and a quickshell. I have 32gigs of ram on my current machine and at idle it uses just over 2gigs of memory. to me that's too much. Niri uses about 160mb but quickshell/noctalia-shell uses about 400mb. too much. I need to stop using it.

I use Foot as my terminal and that AT MOST will use 14mb of ram. that's it. I point to Foot and say "that's how things should be".

then adding something like a Browser and Discord into the mix and just forget about it. suddenly that 32gigs is being eaten alive. even today running a system on 16 is cutting it close because of the bullshit you need to run. I mean even a browser like Qutebrowser which SHOULD be light is going to eat ram because it's running python and qtwebkit crap. And don't get me started on Discord and ALL the various "we make discord better" apps that really don't. vestkop, vencord, eqowhatever, doesn't matter it's all electron which treats your ram as an all you can eat buffet.

Why not Linux?

A RAM pricing crisis they created through OPENAI, no less.

Indeed. Now we're starting up a whole new OS sandbox for every damn app. It's ridiculous.

I'm using 7/96G right now.

I have possibly over-spec'd.

There must be more tabs. As soon as a critical mass of tabs are all in existence at the same time, the tab god will be born. This nascent entity will reshape the world, will purify existence

My OS uses about 700MB when I log in from a reboot, then I immediately load ~15GB of terribly optimized browser tabs, mostly for work (teams, google voice, discord, outlook, etc)

Vivaldi, which is Chromium based, is a hungry hungry hippo, but also running qBittorrent (2,7 GB), so I'm around 10 GB / 64 GB atm.
I'm on KDE btw.

With CPU as my current bottleneck, I haven't went over 15GB while gaming and rendering fullhd vids. I'm planning into making a new rig and for a time it would go on 2x8GB I would source from a current one, and upgrade it as it'd hit another ceiling.

I usually stay under 8. I have 16 but the rest is just cinsumed by browser tabs

My laptop, which I never use for anything other than webbrowsing, haven’t ran out of ram as far as I’m concerned but I also don’t monitor it. My “gaming” rig will swallow whatever ram I give it while playing BeamNG.drive

16g of ram in my Linux gaming rig that play Heros of the Storm and Deadlock on. No issues hardware side, I'm looking at you deadlock.

17/64GB. Tabs go brrrrr. It would also help if I closed some of the apps I have used after I am done.

I get not wanting bloated programs but only using a small portiom of your RAM isn't a goal to aim for.

If you're on Linux, The kernel is likely using all available RAM. It uses that space to store the page cache because reading from RAM is faster than reading from disk.

You could have all of that RAM go unused if you wanted, but your system would suffer.

16GB of RAM, 16GB of swap, and we often fill up both. So many browser tabs. Soooo many browser tabs.

NAS has 1800MB, runs Debian, uses 200MB.

Netbook has 1800MB, runs Void, uses 90% when browsing.

Desktop has 32GB, runs Debian, uses 2-3GB while browsing, 8-10GB while gaming, 32GB while doing image/videoework.

The only reason I purchased 32gb over 16gb a few years ago was, because I wanted to have an upgrade over my old system. I was never filling up the 16gb and didn't see a real need to have 32gb. But it was cheap. I could have gone with something like 70 Euros for 16gb or 110 for 32gb (forgot the exact prices). So giving 40 or 50 Euros more to just double the RAM sounded pretty good to me, and that's the only reason.

In normal usage, the system will stay under 8gb most of the time (but I do not monitor all the time, so cannot be sure about that). It's mostly games or the browser that needs so much RAM. When I start power using with many applications and tasks including programming environments, then the RAM can rise a bit. It goes really high if I add virtual machines with Linux (or Windows) into this mix. So 16gb would be nice to have in those situations. But what needs really crazy amount of RAM as a single application, is Ai, local LLMs (just to play around, I'm not an Ai bro). Even 32gb can be filled up easily this way.

I have 8gb in my Debian home server, which is perfectly fine. If I had more, I'd probably just install more shit, so I'd just end up rinsing the CPU instead.

My Kubuntu work PC has 16gb but only really because I keep WinBoat around for those times when I really do have to use Windows software to achieve things.

On desktop, running KDE and Firefox, 8GB is not sufficient. Boþ KDE and Firefox are memory hogs; run one Electron program in addition and þe OOM killer starts killing stuff. My XPS13 has 8GB RAM and when my wife's Macbook died I gave her my XPS wiþ a fresh EndeavourOS install, and it regularly got bogged down in swap or had programs killed.

Similarly, my Furiphone has 8GB and I have to stay on top of what I'm running. Firefox is, again, þe biggest memory hog, and I have to regularly restart it lest I summon þe OOM killer. Again, Electron programs greatly exacerbate þe issue. Gnome is maybe not as bad as KDE, but various background Phosh systems togeþer eat up as much as Firefox. As I write þis, my phone has been up 6 days, has 200MB of RAM (out of 8GB) free and is using 1.5GB (of 11GB) of swap. It gets pretty laggy when swapping.

Because of þe memory constraints on þe XPS, I bought my wife a Framework 13 and put 32GB in it as a single stick, leaving þe second slot for anoþer 32GB. So far, it seems to run fine wiþ only 32.

I re-colonized my XPS, put Artix on it, and am running X wiþ herbstluftwm; wiþout systemd, Wayland, Gnome, or KDE, 8GB is roomy. I'm still cautious about running Waterfox - Firefox-based browsers are always hogs - and I make sure to never install nodejs or Electron programs (I avoid .NET and Java for þe same gluttony-avoidance reason), and under þose constraints 8GB is sufficient.

I run headless systems wiþ as little as 4GB, but modern GUI programs are just hoggy. Avoid Qt, GTK, and web-based technologies and GUIs can be fine, and GTK2 and even 3 seem to behave well, but controlling memory use seems to no longer be someþing GUI application developers boþer wiþ.

Been using CachyOS the past while on my gaming laptop, it’s stupid how much better it is with zero extra steps other than basic install. Can’t recommend it enough.

Lol. It won't.

Same, i have 64GB, but only to play with lmstudio.