you don't need more 4GB of RAM

The extra space is for two Electron apps of your choice.

Just install Chrome or Firefox. Problem solved.

You've clearly never lived with a cat. Your metaphor is crushed by the Kitty Expansion Theory: No piece of furniture is large enough for a cat and any other additional being.

The other 28GB is for running chrome

Just like the human eye can only register 60fps and no more, your computer can only register 4gb of RAM and no more. Anything more than that is just marketing.

Fucking /S since you clowns can't tell.

Op doesn't run applications, just an os...

My 2010 arm board with 256MB ram running openmediavault and minidlna for music streaming. Still lots of RAM left.

Just wait till all the browser tabs sit down, and need to swap to the floor.

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.

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.

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 have 32GB and regularly fill both that and my swap space to the point where my system freezes up and i have to restart.

i am quite tabby though. And vscode has become quite a memory hog and i usually have several of those open too as i work across different projects

The other day I got a Mini PC to use as a home server (including as media server with Kodi).

It has 8GB of RAM, came with some Windows (10 or 11), didn't even try it and wiped it out, put Lubunto on it and a bunch of services along with Kodi.

Even though it's running X in order to have Kodi there and Firefox is open and everything, it's using slightly over 2GB of RAM.

I keep wanting to upgrade it to 16 GB, because, you know, I just like mucking about with hardware and there's the whole new toy feeling, but I look at the memory usage and just can't bring myself around to do it just for fun, as it would be a completelly useless upgrade and not even bright eyed uuh, shinny me can convince adult me to waste 60 bucks on something so utterly completelly useless.

Hmm. But have you tried it with second and third linuxes? What about eightses?

This is my server and about 28GB sits unused. Just in case I might want to run a new VM or something... 🤣

Someone clearly doesn’t play Cities: Skylines with mods

Much like a cat can stretch out and somehow occupy an entire queen-sized bed, Linux will happily cache your file system as long as there is available memory.

If that picture was of a Windows installation, Windows would be a Sumo Wrestler instead of a kitten.

4GB? I think you should clean up a little, do a like debloating

I actually run 32GB on my desktop with Mint. I run 12GB on my laptop with Mint. Both of these have Celeron CPUs.

I love it.

mount $HOME in tmpfs

Me using jvm based software for work and it barely being enough...

Running and LSP on a monorepo will destroy those 4gigs no problem.

When I start editing in Davinci Resolve....well, that's why I went from 32 to 64 a few years ago.

The cat is the Rimworld mod with a hefty memory leak yesterday. 32 GB was full in seconds. But it gave me enough time to find the culprit and kill Rimworld without trashing my session every time.

"Free" memory is actually usually used for cache. So instead of waiting to get data from the disk, the system can just read it directly from RAM after the first access. The more RAM you have, the more free space you'll have to use for cache. My machine often has over 20GB of RAM used as cache. You can see this with free -m. IIRC both Gnome and KDE's system managers also show that now.

Now snap some pics of this kitty laying in different places all over this couch; you now have a new meme: Address Space Layout Randomization.

I installed 64gb of ram on my gaming laptop and Chrome took all of it.

Nature finds a way. My Fedora 39 box with 32GB rests at like 4-ish and goes to 8-ish with a browser open.

I just took a Core i5, 6 GB RAM laptop from 2011 and reinstalled Linux Mint and put in a 1 TB SSD. The difference between that and Ubuntu 23.10 and a 750 GB 5400 RPM drive was like night and day.

Android studio: *big fat cat in the middle of the sofa"

Kid named programs above OS-level:

That’s nice… if you only plan to run a bare operating system. Try processing some big-ass data files with R.

32gb is just enough for a homelab

This just means you're future proofed

You haven't tried compiling unreal engine or clicking too often on subsurface subdivision in Blender. But yeah you don't need it for playing games.

Just using local llama takes 32GB ram

I feel like recently developed games and apps expect the user to have a "moden" sized RAM, meaning that the decs don't give a crap about optimizing RAM-usage.

In a similar fashion I got my sons old netbook. It has 32GB flash as storage medium. 27GB were in use by Windows, Office, and Firefox. User file size was neglectable. Then it ran into problems because it wanted to download an 8GB update.

Now it runs Kubuntu, which uses about 4GB with LibreOffice and a load of other things.

Transcoding an HDR blueray to h265 filled it up pretty quick and I'm about to start dabbling with game development/3d modeling.

I've also filled it up pretty quick learning how fast various data structures are in which situations. You don't really see a difference in speed until you get into the billions of items at least for python.

Me on my 32GB ThinkPad that spends 99% of its time running only a browser and email client

It's great that the system is so efficient. But things do come up. I once worked with an LSP server that was so hungry that I had to upgrade from 32 to 64gb to stop the OOM crashes. (Tbf I only ran out of memory when running the LSP server and compiler at the same time - but hey, I have work to do!) But now since I'm working in a different area I'm just way over-RAMed.

my install regularly balloons to 24gb...... it's probably zoom's fault, but still

That that to the 3000 browser tabs I have open, two instances of VS code, the multithreaded python app I’m running and developing, the several-gigabytes large dataset that’s active in memory.

Some days, even 64 GB isn’t enough.

If your Linux is not using 99% of RAM, then it's misconfigured.

More is more.

Reminds me of a comment I made a few days ago that some people thought was a joke but nope, I was being serious.

https://lemmy.world/comment/9852161

me a hard KVM user need a lot of RAM

Always see my system chilling at 5 or 6 gb

I ran with 8gb ram for 7 years because zram would shove my swap into what little ram I had available and it actually worked well enough that I didn't feel like upgrading until this year lol.

Big dawg here running a supercomputer with 4 gigs of RAM. /s

4GB of RAM: load a model into llama.cpp

Explodes

I put in 64GB because I'm a piece of shit and those empty memory slots looked bad

General rule of thumb with building systems - "you never know..." so better safe than sorry.

I was working on an app that needed to run on windows. Between chrome and virtual box, i absolutely had to upgrade to more than 16G

As somebody with a System76 laptop, I'm feeling personally attacked.

I actually downgraded my Laptop from 16 to 8 gig DDR3L and did not spot a difference

i had to upgrade my pc from 6gb to 16gb a few years ago because gnome kept stealing all of my ram and then my system would lock up once it was full

That's why I have 16GB on my main pc. The highest I've ever seen it was 8GB while playing Alan wake 2

this is so real.

Spin up some VMs on that thing!

4GB are used for GPU on my 32

$ free -h
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            28Gi       2.9Gi        21Gi        24Mi       4.1Gi        25Gi

my tandy sensation didn't need more than 4mb of ram

I was running out of RAM on my 16GB system for years (just doing normal work tasks), so I finally upgraded to a new laptop with 64GB of RAM. Now I never run out of memory.

Elden ring says otherwise.

That's how mine looks like. Then docker is the fat person that takes up the rest of the couch.

If you ever have an interest in running local LLMs you're gonna wish you got even more

Jokes on you, here's my memory architecture:

https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/black-holes-store-information-0023534/

I got 32 just so I could hoard more browser tabs. I have a more minimal setup on my laptop that goes with me places and any tabs I anticipate not needing for a couple weeks or more go to the desktop with more ram.

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...