While 8GB is typically enough for Linux today, it may not be enough a few years from now. Buying a laptop with 8GB of soldered in RAM would limit the useful life of it.

[–] brie@beehaw.org 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

It will probably depend on distro. Some distros might get more bloated, but I think most won't do anything that makes them unusable on lower-spec hardware, especially those that specifically have low system requirements as one of their core tenets.

[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Everything seems to get more bloated over time. An 8GB system probably won't become unusable soon, but things will certainly begin to run less smoothly to the point that many people would replace the computer. Browsers and electron apps are RAM hogs.

[–] brie@beehaw.org 2 points 5 months ago

It depends on the use case, but for what it's worth on a 4GB Android tablet, I can run VSCode + Chromium/Firefox via Termux without too much trouble. ~2GB of memory is taken by Android, so 8GB on a proper Linux system is more like 3x more memory available. It would take a massive amount of bloat to make an impact. My main concern would like with websites being wasteful with both memory and CPU usage via JS, rather than the browser itself becoming bloated.

[–] Marsupial@quokk.au 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Just to run the OS sure, but what about the ever enlarging bloated software?

[–] brie@beehaw.org 3 points 5 months ago

That would depend largely on the use-case and specific software. I'm fairly confident that Lyx isn't going to become bloated any time soon, but I can see that happening especially with proprietary alternatives like Word (ignoring for a moment Word isn't on Linux). It all really depends on whether or not a less bloated alternative exists.

[–] lazynooblet@lazysoci.al 6 points 5 months ago

With 8G oom killer will kill my Firefox process.

I was evaluating Linux desktop prior to switching my work pc to Linux with an 8G VM and it wasn't enough for just browsing and general tinkering.

[–] Valmond@beehaw.org 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yep, browsing, developing, listening to music all alright on 8GB, could probably run on even 4.

[–] admiralteal@kbin.social 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

My memory idles on around 3341MiB with a browser and just a few basic daemons like Syncthing used in mint cinnamaon. 4GB is pretty tight unless you are willing to make some behavioural changes or use a less friendly distro. But 8GB is more than enough.

Different story trying to run VMs on my server, though.