Why should the OS itself, which is just supposed to facilitate the running of programs, use so much memory?
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=2While Ubuntu recommends 6GB, it still uses much less than that even if you open Chrome lol
If you enable zswap, you could probably live with 4GB
I run Debian on 6GBs. Before that, Windows 10 was close to unusable, but in all fairness I had it on an HDD while Debian is running off a by now two years old SSD.
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.
Fuck Discord
Not at these prices it ain’t. Back to 8 it is.
Why not Linux?
Linux at home yes. But corporate has insisted the price increases dont matter at my work as my bonus is engulfed.
Microsoft just straight up admitting that they’re not optimising their OS anymore
Ever since Windows 7.
Since the NT kernel.
Since DOS 4
32gb is the new standard they need to run poorly optimized start menus and telemetry in the background while they think no one is paying attention
I have 32 GB RAM in my linux box. Not because I need it (I use 5,7GB currently), but because it was kind of cheap when I build the box. 16 GB or 32 GB were just a few Euros apart.
But with the current RAM crisis? Holy crap, that is kind of a tone deaf statement
Im running Void on a 2013, dual core atom, netbook with 1800MB of ram, THAT is a compromise. No more than 4-5 tabs at a time, only one if I want to watch a video, but it works.
16GB being the minimum for a desktop OS is insane.
I suspect part of it is modern web browsers and everything being online. That and “web apps” and such that take up WAY to much resources for what they do. In the name of security and justifiably so, each tab typically has it’s own thread/task which means more memory. They will free up as needed, but don’t do well always. With so many people just keeping tabs open rather than bookmarking them, users have also changed how they use their computers. So 16GB being a minimum and 32GB being recommended seems reasonable for a NEW computer. Remember, software is just going to need more resources in the future.
Existing computers will be fine for a while longer, but will get to that “compromised” state eventually.
God damn I brought an old atom back to life with the leanest distro I could run just a month ago. 1gb ram. It is an absolute paperweight.
The atom processors were garbage when they came out. I hate e waste as much as the next person but that’s a level of masochism I will not subject myself to. Pull the salvageables and refine the rest into a pawn shop puddle.
My home server is a 2014 Mac mini with 8gb of soldered RAM. Even with that much, I can’t really use even LibreWolf if I want to stand any chance of the services I have installed having any RAM.
Holy false equivalency, Batman
Void is a full featured desktop OS, it can run a browser, play games, watch videos, and run an office suite. All of those applications have their own hardware requirements but the OS is just the layer between the things you want to do and the hardware you are using. It should be as light as possible and Void shows that it is possible to be very light.
I mean that’s fair, but everyone was bragging about how their 640kb in UMB was plenty to play doom. I was more curious what it would take to play like Cyberpunk or something
Same here, but I put in 64GB because it was cheap. The only app I used (I don’t anymore) that would make use of that much was Photoshop, back when I was still a graphic designer. Even then, I didn’t need it, but it was nice to have.
In the middle of a RAM pricing crisis? Fuck off microslop.
A RAM pricing crisis they created through OPENAI, no less.
In reality, if software used the native UI toolkits instead of Electron, even 12 GB could be reliably used for gaming, HEAVY gaming.
Indeed. Now we’re starting up a whole new OS sandbox for every damn app. It’s ridiculous.
“Bully tells nerd to come to school with more lunch money next time” ass bullshit.
With 32 GB system RAM, Microsoft believes that the games can have more “breathing room”.
There’s no such thing as “breathing room”, dammit. Once you set up 32 GB as standard, shitty / assumptive developers are going to say “well, we assooooome users have 32 GB. It would be a waste to design the game to use less than that lol lmao”. Specially devs doing the same as Microslop, and using AI shitty code to pump out code faster than humans can desloppify.
just like the gaming industry telling you 60fps is too low and your GTX series graphics card is inadequate today. but despite this i, amazingly, get by just fine. it’s literally just blatant consumerism.
I’ve never stopped using my 1080 thing is a tank that works fine for like 95% of what I do. I’m a game dev lol. Now I will say that I can’t perceive fps faster than about 45 and that’s just for fast moving stuff so I cap most games I play to 30fps, and I’ve finally hit the age where I need bigger font and I usually do that by lowering game resolution
If you like <60FPS. Fine with me.
But don’t force/assume your opinion on others.I’m sorry that the above opinion was forced upon you, that must be terrible.
They can fuck right off
“640KB of memory ought to be enough for anybody.”
- Bill Gates
I can run a gba emulator, an llm, a full os and a browser all at the same time with 4gb, so I think Windows is the compromise
I run a full os, a browser, and vintage story. It uses nearly 18 gigs of ram. I think linux is the problem.
Ram is ram, you have either be stupid or making a bad faith argument to say what is or isn’t a good amount of it.
The only correct amount of ram is the amount that covers your work load. Full stop. Yes windows could use less ideally. But we can’t keep pretending that 8 gigs of ram is remotely fucking acceptable for ever.
Just because you don’t use programs that consume larger amounts of ram doesn’t mean none of us do.
That’s such a funny thing to say when like 90% of personal computers are basically used for browser and office, which both should be able to run perfectly fine on 8gb.
Windows has been actively going down a ram thirsty route for some time now.
You can easily have a fast and convinent system with 8gb of ram running most Linux distros with a browser of you choice and LibreOffice.
My laptop right now is running CacheyOS with KDE with 8 tabs on librewolf (one of which is a playing 1080p video) libreoffice writer and a system monitor, all of this on a 4k screen and everything is snappy. My ram usage? 6.5gb and no swap.
Windows 11 struggles to run smoothly on 8gb, let alone running multiple programs and videos playing.
So what the hell are you talking about?
The only correct amount of ram is the amount that covers your work load. Full stop.
Incorrect, as you immediately point out in the second half of the sentence.
Yes windows could use less ideally.
The correct amount of RAM is the amount that covers your workload and the baseline overhead of supporting components, in this case, an OS.
As a general rule, windows uses significantly more RAM for baseline.
But we can’t keep pretending that 8 gigs of ram is remotely fucking acceptable for ever.
Agreed, but we can push back on them pretending that it has nothing to do with their (subjectively shitty) choices.
Slop code and CSS kids need that space!
Alright Linux guys… how much RAM do you use on a normal day? Not looking at you power guys who are running every damn thing to max out your 128GB…
I have 32GB but rarely hit over 8GB, probably less, unless I’m running some serious apps like graphics.
I got that 32GB because of Win10 to give me more comfort room. Now I don’t need it as much running Linux.
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.
I’m using 7/96G right now.
I have possibly over-spec’d.
Sell 64GB and retire early!
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)
For discord i suggest to install Dorion, it is a discord client, it uses like ~22mb of ram on my computer
I use discord quite heavily; the TOS violation and risk of ban has me a little risk averse when it comes to discord.
At 22mb it must reverse-engineer the protocol rather than just being a web wrapper.
It is a web wrapper, you can even enable (but only if you want) vencord or equicord so i am sure it is a web wrapper, also, i just remembered that the first time i used it, it had like 90/100 mb of ram usage then i changed i did something in the settings and it went down to a steady 22mb, if i remember correctly i installed “OpenAsar DOM optimizer” shelter plugin (which you can use alongside vencord/equicord)
Edit: just checked, it uses Tauri, so on linux you may have some problems like some lag
I use discord quite heavily; the TOS violation and risk of ban has me a little risk averse when it comes to discord
It’s actually hard to get banned for these things, mainly because discord don’t give a fuck and many are hard to detect, the thing that may ban you are API abuses but just stay away from those plugins and don’t touch experiments; I never got banned in 2 years of using mods and clients, and i did some crazy stuff
I usually stay under 8. I have 16 but the rest is just cinsumed by browser tabs
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.
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.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
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 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.
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.
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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.
On my Linux system it caches about 4 gig of stuff, the rest of RAM not used by apps is totally unused. No issues at all
16GB of RAM, 16GB of swap, and we often fill up both. So many browser tabs. Soooo many browser tabs.
6/8GB lmao. I have some tabs, spotify, discord, protonmail etc. open, casual stuff. This one is my old one running zorin, I can get it to about 1GB on idle which is fine since I have eye candy settings. I had mint on this earlier, but for some reason it drank memory like a sponge and I could barely have couple tabs open, so I dunno whatever zorin is doing but it’s working way lighter
System monitor says I’m running 12GB, but there’s a lot of unnecessary stuff open, and last time I restarted this machine is 4 days ago. Plus at this rate my computer is basically a server, and since I already have 32 GB I don’t care too much about memory management any more.
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.
