I remember building my gaming machine in 2008 and put 4GB (2x2) in, then RAM prices tanked 6 months later so I added another 4GB. I remember having lots of conversations where I was like “yeah, 8GB is over kill” but what I didn’t expect is that it was such overkill that when I built my next machine in 2012, I still only put 8GB on it.
It wasn’t until 2019 that I built a machine and put 16GB in it. I ran on 8GB for over a decade. Pretty impressive for gaming.
I ran my old machine also from 2010 till this year on 8gb. Also for gaming the 2010 i7 was quite fine. The only bottleneck was the VRAM where we somehow went from 1GB being perfectly suitable to 4GB being barely enough. Meanwhile old games sometimes look better than modern games, because they actually put effort into optimizing the graphics.
Am I the only one around here that maxes out their RAM to the max that the board will take? Sure 128 Gig is overkill now, but the 32 Gig I installed in my last laptop was supposed to be overkill just 3 years ago. I did manage to use my previous laptop for a whole 12 years with only 16 Gig.
I installed 64 GB of RAM in my Windows laptop 4 years ago and had been using 64 GB of RAM in the laptop that it replaced - which was from 2013 (I think I bought it in 2014-2105). I was using 32 GB of RAM prior (on Linux and Windows laptops), all the way back to 2007 or so.
My work MacBook Pros generally have 32-64 GB of RAM, but my personal MacBook Air (the 15” M2) has 16 GB, simply because the upgrade wasn’t a cost effective one (and the M1 before it had performed great with 16) and because I’d only planned on using it for casual development. But since I’ve been using it as my main personal development machine and for self-hosted AI, and have run into its limits, when I replace it I’ll likely opt for 64 GB or more.
My Windows gaming desktop only has 32 GB of RAM, though - that’s because getting the timings higher with more RAM - particularly 4 sticks - was prohibitively expensive when I built it, and then when the cost wasn’t a concern and I tried to upgrade, I learned that my third and fourth RAM slots weren’t functional. I could upgrade to 64 GB in two slots but it wouldn’t really be worth it, since I only use it for gaming.
My Linux desktop / server has 128 GB of ECC RAM, though, because that’s as much as the motherboard supported.
I have no problems currently on my personal computer with 16GB. If RAM is ever an issue, you can always upgrade (especially if you leave slots empty). Plus RAM generally has a tendency to get cheaper over time, so why waste money now?
In 2008 a lot of most software was still 32 bit, you couldn’t use more than 4GiB per process. In that sense anything more than that was overkill unless you used a lot of programs at the same time and your OS supported physical address extension (PAE).
All windows and Linux versions I’ve run since 2008 supported 64 bit. The games I was running might not have, but I can’t really be held responsible for what they want to write. Also, multitasking has always been a thing, and chrome came out in 2008 as well, so the single task 4GB limitations hasn’t really been an issue for a while as far as gaming/regular desktop usage goes(unless, again, the applications you’re running aren’t written to support 64bit/more than 4GB, which you can’t really be held responsible for.)
I too have 8gb and I hate it ( although i do use a lot of browser tabs on second screen it just isnt enough if you wanna do something else on the side :prolly can even do with 4 if I really limited myself and hated every second of it but even 8 isn’t good enough
8 is enough if you’re not multitasking too much
wanna play a game? close absolutely everything except maybe discord (if you need it), but keep it in the tray
wanna look sth up while playing? don’t forget to close the browser afterwards
yeah I agree thats why i said i hate every second of it ( coz without movies or second screen browser everything gets really boring even the most engaging games ( ofc any newer game is out of the question )
It really depends on what you are doing with your system…
On my main PC I want the full Linux Desktop experience, including some Gnome tools that require webkit - and since I am running Gentoo, installing/updating webkit takes a lot of RAM - I would recommend 32 GiB at least.
My laptop on the other hand is an MNT Reform, powered by a Banana Pi CM4 with merely 4 GiB of memory. There I am putting in some effort to keep the system lightweight, and that seems to work well for me up to now. As long as I can avoid installing webkit or compiling the Rust compiler from source, I am perfectly happy with 4 GiB. So happy actually, that I currently don’t feel the need to upgrade the Reform to the newly released RK3588 processor module, despite it being a lot faster and it having 32 GiB of memory.
Oh, and last, but not least, my work PC… I’m doing Unreal game development at work, and there the 64 GiB main memory and 8 GiB VRAM I have are the absolute bare minimum. If it were an option, I would prefer to have 128 GiB of RAM, and 16 GiB of VRAM, to prevent swapping and to prevent spilling of VRAM into main memory…
Current 4 year old laptop with 128GB of ECC RAM is wonderful and is used all the time with simulations, LLMs, ML modelling, and the real heavy lifter, Google Chrome.
Most modern laptops can do 64 gb of ddr4. It’s expensive but doable. Like most U series CPUs are limited at 64 gb. Something with a xeon mobile chip will probably see a lot more.
yeah, i was just pointing out that we’ve seen desktop chips in laptops before, it’s not common, but it has happened, and will likely continue to happen.
Dell 7740 Workstation laptop. Has a Xeon processor and a 16GB Quadro video card as well. 5 M2 slots so I currently have 36TB of SSD as well. 4k screen, physical privacy shutter camera, actual buttons for the trackpad. I love this thing.
I have this misunderstanding even if I use Linux a lot that when I work for a long time with a lot of things opened… my RAM fill up and never get down.
I heard it had to do with swap, can you quickly explain why?
Its more likely caching. They just keep the cache of files opened earlier so that its ready for you if you need it immediately again. Also unused ram is wasted ram
Appreciate this. I have a Chromebook running Garuda with only 4gb of RAM, and if I get too much going the system locks up. This might help it handle things better.
horrible take IMO. firefox is using 12GB for me right now, but you have no idea how many or what kind of tabs either of us have, which makes all the difference to the point your comment has no value whatsoever.
but you have no idea how many or what kind of tabs either of us have,
Can’t speak for you but I certainly do have an idea of how many and what kind of tabs I have and how many and what kind of tabs I used to have in Chrome.
would certainly love to see your side by side comparison of a large difference in memory usage between the two using the same tabs and no extensions with up to date versions.
How come it has no value? I used to run Chrome but now I run Firefox. My browsing habits have not changed yet the memory consumption has greatly improved. It may not have any value to you but it certainly was a valuable experience for me and I made the comment hoping that it might find someone who is in the same situation as I was. I’ve got nothing to prove and nothing to gain. Anyone may run their own experiment.
I’m not the person you responded to, but I can say that it’s a perfectly fine take. My personal experience and the commonly voiced opinions about both browsers supports this take.
Unless you’re using 5 tabs max at a time, my personal experience is that Firefox is more than an order of magnitude more memory efficient than Chrome when dealing with long-lived sessions with the same number of tabs (dozens up to thousands).
I keep hundreds of tabs open in Firefox on my personal machine (with 16 GB of RAM) and it’s almost never consuming the most memory on my system.
Policy prohibits me running Firefox on my work computer, so I have to use Chrome. Even with much more memory (both on 32 GB and 64 GB machines) and far fewer tabs (20-30 at most vs 200-300), Chrome often ends up taking up far too much memory + having a substantial performance drop, and I have to to through and prune the tabs I don’t need right now, bookmark things that can be done later, etc…
In my experience of switching from Chrome to Firefox in the last year thanks to Lemmy, I have to say that using FF for work comes with all sorts of performance issues.
Then again, my specific use case includes having ~10 windows open at ~20 tabs each, sometimes even more. Definitely pushing the limits of the browser lol
I genuinely don’t know how people are having their web browser use so much ram. How many tabs do you have open? Even at work where I run a commercial loan origination system and our core customer system in a web browser, at most I’ll have 15-20 tabs open. I don’t know how people are having dozens and dozens of tabs open that they’re using 64 gb of RAM.
In my case, along with using my laptop as a regular PC, I also use this as my work computer. I contract for multiple companies and each window has tabs for each web software for every company, organized by consolidated tabs. So Google analytics, Crazyegg, tableau, and docs, calendar, etc. I also do web testing and each tab has tests.
I find that Edge does a better job at memory management so it’s now my primary and I test on Chrome.
I use both Fedora (daily driver) and Windows 11 Pro (gaming), and Windows doesn’t use much more RAM honestly. Fedora uses currently 10.5 GB of RAM with Firefox, Spotify, Plex, and Telegram running (looks like a couple of YouTube tabs in Firefox are having a party here with 1 GB of used RAM for three tabs…), and Windows is typically only 1-2 GB above this with the same type of usage. I have never maxed out my 32 GB of RAM on either OSs.
You have a lot of ram, linux will try to use most of it, it’s a normal thing. There’s a huge difference from using a large amount of ram when available to NEEDING that amount to run.Try installing both OSes on a machine with 4gb, and see the difference between them. One will be usable, while the other will have a poor performance. You can even push it harder with a 1gb machine. Linux will provide a system with basic functionality, while windows will be unusable.
I have the same setup - Fedora daily driver and Windows 11 Pro. I recently switched from Windows daily driver and it’s crazy how much better my laptop runs with Fedora. Processor temp and RAM usage are both less than half of what they were on Windows.
never had issues with gnome on my laptop with 4 gbs of ddr3, actually it’s pretty smooth even while running from an 8 year old 5200rpm hdd, even with all the animations and stuff enabled.
freezes a bit while loading icons in the app menu for the first time after boot but it’s really usable once everything gets cached to ram.
Your experience matches mine more than op’s. In fact I have a super shitty old laptop running gnome on fedora with a 32gb drive and I think 4 GB of RAM, maybe less, and it still sounds better than the experience they’re claiming to have had with 6 gb ram.
this was a few years back around gnome 41 maybe, who knows if things have changed since then or if something was just really wrong with my install. can’t really test anymore because i kind of already upgraded the pc
yeah you need to mess around with snappiness to avoid that
(so either increase it to make it unload stuff to hdd earlier, leaving more ram for critical stuff, or decrease it to like 5 in order to make it only use swap when absolutely needed) basically just mess around with it and see what value works best. i my case 10-15 works more or less okay-ish under full ram load
About 10 years ago I was like “FINE, clearly 512MB of memory isn’t enough to avoid swapping hell, I’ll get 1 GB of extra memory.” …and that was that!
These days I’m like “4 GB on a single board computer? Oh that’s fine. You may need that much to run a browser. And who’s going to run a browser regularly on a SBC? …oh I’ve done it a lot of times and it’s… fine.”
The thing I learned is that you can run a whole bunch of SHIT HOT server software on a system with less than a gigabyte of memory. The moment you run a web browser? FUCK ALL THAT.
And that’s basically what I found out long ago. I had a laptop that had like 32 megs of memory. Could be a perfectly productive person with that. Emacs. Darcs. SSH over a weird USB Wi-Fi dongle. But running a web browser? Can’t do Firefox. Opera kinda worked. Wouldn’t work nowadays, no. But Emacs probably still would.
It really depends on the quality of software you are running? A SMTP, IMAP, Mumble, Photoprism, Jellyfin, bittorrent, Tor, Subsonic compatible server, who even remembers what else? Fine. One small Minecraft world? Boom you’re dead.
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