A tiling window manager won't save you when dealing with Electron apps.

I run Linux and StumpWM on my desktop, and recently I had upgrade to 12GB of RAM, because it turns out 8GB is very easy to exhaust these days. I currently have 9.3GB tied up, mostly by browser processes.

Yeah, this. I'm mostly using swaywm instead of Gnome in order to free up about 1 extra gigabyte of RAM for apps, but that equals about one Electron app. The only Electron app I haven't eliminated from my daily usage, though is Patchwork, so it's not so bad.

Funny thing is I use my i3wm environment on 16gb of RAM and a 4k screen. I'm actually migrating to rat poison because it's so incredibly simple and basic that it has been making me drool. I mean, look at the source code. It doesn't get much simpler than that for a tiled WM.

If you are interested in rat poison, you may also enjoy xmonad. I've used both and much preferred xmonad

Load the entire GHC garbage collected runtime just for my window manager? Isn't this the same philosophy that causes people to use Electron? And that results in unnecessarily large memory footprints and runtime performance penalties?

Xmonad is rock solid, lightening fast, and perfect for many who prefer to minimize their reliance on a mouse

I don't think esoteric linuxes are really necessary--I'm running vanilla Ubuntu 16.04 with 16GB RAM and top three processes are only Crashplan (~800MB), Dropbox (~460) and Chrome (327 resident, 1380 shared, per htop, with 6 tabs running). My total usage at the moment is 4.04GB out of 15.4 available, again per htop. Some of the other numbers in this thread are baffling to me.

But I don't run any Electron apps, so there's that.

But, yeah, I guess I wouldn't be able to run this same workload with 4GB RAM. That's what lubuntu is for.

Oh, no, I'm aware these are very much Win10 specific problems and I look at Linux people with a not insignificant degree of envy. Unfortunately, I do quite like PC gaming.

Modern gnome is a pig, some of this could be tracked back to gnome-shell's use of javascript and css styling if you were so inclined. Most linux users don't really notice it due to the fact that most x86 machines are crazy fast.

OTOH, try starting a modern full blown distro on something like an rpi instead of raspian and you will quickly discover that you _NEED_ more than 4G of ram and a lot of CPU just to start firefox. Its even worse if you don't have hardware GL acceleration.

OTOH, the lightweight desktops (lxqt, lxdt, xfce) really are..

While it would seem convenient to simply switch operating systems from the popular, widespread options to...whatever i3wm is, practically speaking that is seldom possible.

I3wm is a window manager you can run on any Linux distribution

Tiling wm does not an OS make.

Can you run recent versions of Photoshop? How about Premiere, or Final Cut?

SolidWorks? CATIA? Matlab?

I find that the best way to do this is to just VNC to a windows or Mac dedicated slave computer to do graphic arts work. VNC is so good nowadays that I can use my QHD phone screen as a second monitor for all my Adobe apps- and the lag nowadays is almost non-existent thanks to super fast wifi.

FreeRDP for connecting to Windows is a good option too.

Should say that KRDC is a good RD connection manager, but it's KDE only unless you wanna install a third of it.

Matlab works on linux.

Premier or Final cut don't but DaVinci Resolve and Lightworks do.

Obviously if your workflow and thus your livelihood depends on a particular tool you should run a platform that runs it but I would question why someone with money would pick windows over mac.

Those are commercial apps for people with real money. OTOH, there are a number of unbeatable free apps that don't have linux ports. Fusion360 comes to mind, its not solidworks level , but its light years ahead of freecad.