| From: Howard Gibson via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | | I have long ago given up trying to run computers on 8GB RAM. For | GNU/Linux, 16GB minimum. What tasks to you do that challenge computers with only 8 GiB? For me, it is Firefox with a lot of tabs. I'm sure that some web pages are way more RAM-intensive than others (see about:performance) but I rarely pick pages based on weight. I admit that I keep way too many tabs open but mostly on my desktop which has 24 GiB of RAM. I regularly run Fedora / GNOME desktop on 4 G machines. They work but are not fast, for multiple reasons. They have Atom-microarchitecture processors and eMMC "disks", both of which slow them down. On the plus side, they are delightfully inexpensive, small, energy efficient, and silent. I have several notebooks, of varying ages, with 8 GiB of RAM. They all work fine. RAM is cheap enough to overbuy, except when you are forced to buy it with the computer. Manufacturers really pad the price of computers with more RAM. Most notebooks now come with soldered RAM, not socketed. Some notebooks come with soldered RAM plus an empty or occupied socket. That's not as good as two sockets. Best performance, all other things being equal, is to have the same RAM size in the socket and soldered. Any variation comes at a cost. One reason I bought this particular cheap notebook is that it came with a perfect memory configuration for upgrading to 16 GiB. A certain amount of RAM is tied up in fixed overhead assignments: the kernel, the memory used by the iGPU, the memory used by NVMe drives. So doubling RAM makes more than twice as much RAM available for applications. In this particular case, adding RAM added RAM bandwidth, improving the speed of computation.