I think the people who claim that 16 GB isn't enough are insane, but it should be said: at 4 GB it does become a bit problematic to both keep browsers with a bunch of tabs open and do other things smoothly. If we keep modern website hogs out of the picture, I completely agree with you.

I tally about 500-1000 MB doing my job – if I can close the browsers that I do admittedly need to read documentation.

2GB here, Chromium under OpenBSD with cwm(1).

my ~/.config/chromium-flags.conf file:

        --ignore-gpu-blocklist
        --enable-gpu-rasterization
        #--enable-zero-copy
        --disable-sync-preferences
        --disable-reading-from-canvas
        --disable-smooth-scrolling
        --wm-window-animations-disabled
        --enable-low-end-device-mode

> I think the people who claim that 16 GB isn't enough are insane

The problem is containers. Some development workflows appear to require running a container for every piece of software needed, and that adds up (and feels incredibly wasteful).

None of my development workflow requires containers locally, so I get by just fine with 16gb.

I wonder when the pendulum will swing back and people will stop this insanity. I can already picture the buzzwords people will invent to describe "apps running on the OS itself".

On the other hand it's no insanity to run millions of lines of code in a computer, connected to the internet and hopefully sharing all the projects you need to work with and dependencies you need to make them work, with full access to your filesystem, usually requiring administrator rights to be installed or even used.

This would all be needless if there was an OS that allowed you to switch to another "env" wiping the RAM in the process (like, storing a snapshot of it for when you switch back), with guaranteed isolation at the filesystem level (perhaps able to still read-only link into common libs), able to install things without touching other "envs". If you're working in any webdev related environment, that is itself the definition of insanity.

It's like buying a hammer from the carpenter at the end of the road and giving access to all your house to him in the process, including your wife. Everything becomes a nail.

Maybe I'm just a simplistic person, but classical Linux distributions make this problem non-existing for 99% of what goes on in my world.

Their role is precisely to orchestrate the cooperation and interdepndency of those millions of lines of code. I don't understand why people have started turning those distros into glorified delivery vehicles for containers.

Simplistic is actually good - but I don't think that any (?) of the available current OSes is able to contain a program that can run once as administrator right? If I'm not recalling it incorrectly, BSD jails, linux cgroups, user filesystem permission, docker, vm's - and that's at the surface.

"A bare-OS application" sounds almost as cool as "bare-metal".

That would require people to clean up. Sometimes I squint at the installation requirements and then head over to hub.docker.com. I think it will get worse (i.e. more layers on top) before it gets better.

Yeah when you see "install this docker" OR "follow this 10,000 line install and compile guide" and then have to explain to your boss what you've been up to today.

Yeah, containers or VM's up the count indeed, but still. 2 Parallels (test version for m1) VMs running server ubuntu, 1 with 2 ssh connections, for X and tunnelling, running emacs into my desktop, running a web server with repl and environment, other running Postgresql. Safari with 8 tabs open, 4 terminal windows, Xquartz, tells me the biggest memory footprint is the vm with emacs/server/repl, at 3.9GB followed by the other VM at 2.8GB, but the overall used mem says 6GB used(?).

From the tabs Gmail was pointing to +1GB - a browser email client consuming +1/3 of the memory a VM running an OS plus a database.

I sometimes have another VM, another 2 ssh conns, more tabs open including youtube and never noticed any slow/sluggish behaviour.

I also feel like running VMs is wasteful, but it seems we are not able to create OSes with proper native tools for isolation.

Why would containers do anything to memory requirements? I guess you can't share libraries, but otherwise I don't see why memory use should be any different running the same process in a container or not.

> The problem is containers.

Even this makes little sense unless your containers are really poorly sized. I used to run a mini Kubernetes cluster on my desktop with 6 nodes. Some of them running big Java projects, Postgres, Elastisearch, and Ruby. And I still had enough memory to run Rubymine or IntelliJ along with Slack and whatever other local stuff I needed.

tab discard extensions go a long way toward keeping browsers under control, just pin the tabs that you absolutely can't wait 3 seconds for them to reload or because you need notifications from them.

Linux desktop environment runs fine with 2GB

Can confirm, my VMs default to 4GB of memory and run just fine.

Yeah but throw in firefox or chrome and some electron apps and your processor will be crying and your memory starting to overflow.

Good luck compiling large sources on 4gb

Since when compiling large sources is a desktop environment?

There are projects that you cannot link if you have under 32 GB; but that is not enough to say that desktop environment you use while compiling is unusable under 32 GB.

2GB of RAM user here, done that with clang as it uses far less memory than GCC.

I mean really how many people are recompiling their entire code base every single day? Is their make/build environment so bad that they can't trust incremental compiles? I'm getting along just fine on my 8GB laptop. I know some people work with big datasets and video and such but holy cow. Most of us are probably just writing code for a browser/backend/library/test and not pushing around terabytes of data.

Maybe these people never heard of ccache.