I try to humble myself there. While 32GB seems ridiculous for 2005, I've absolutely enjoyed having 64GB in 2022. Yes, apps have gotten more bloated. Yes there are many wasteful framework-built heavy apps. In many cases they are doing much more than in 2005.

I wonder if anyone is tracking the average amount of memory somewhere from 1980-forward. I'd take that value * 2 for a developer.

I’m not sure about RAM, but in a large software project that is compiled (even Java) it’s pretty easy to max out every core I have available when building.

The moment you have to work on a large code base either in Java or C++ you almost never have enough resources. 64GB RAM is fair, 32GB bare minimum to work on such codebases. Otherwise everything slows down, IntelliJ will take 2 seconds to open up etc.

If you don't work on such code bases then yes 16GB is more than enough and 8GB you can live with on your day to day life.

A equivalent MacBook Air would outdo this configuration with an equivalent configuration based on the price

People who need 32 GB of RAM are where you do mobile development for multiple phones. I don’t think the price can be judged. If the RAm is ddr5 or if the SSD is very fast or how it behaves in real world developer workflows is much more important.

Linux seems to have much worse memory management for desktop usage than other popular desktop operating systems. I have found that I really need 64GB of RAM to make Chrome run well on Linux, but I can get a similar user experience with as little as 16GB of RAM on other desktop operating systems. Firefox does much better, but Chrome seems to be the standard these days, and a computer that doesn't run Chrome well is probably defective in most people's eyes these days.

Just anecdotally, my dev workflows on Manjaro with KDE typically required ~18GB RAM (VSC, nodejs, rust, elixir, mongodb, redis, docker, db mgmt tool, browser, mail client, Slack, etc).

On MacOS (switched to 2021 MBP 14) basically identical setup is sitting on ~29GB.

I have no idea about Windows, but I don't think anyone would argue that there's much more room on Linux to adjust and optimize for lower RAM usage than on MacOS / Win

Huh? I have 64GB of ram in my Ubuntu workstation. I run FF, Chrome, Docker, etc etc and regularly have some 55+ GB free.

But you might not be running corporate security tools that invariably eat cycle after cycle, to the point crashing the desktop.

I often have to defend Linux because unknowing colleagues blame the OS, when htop shows it's this or that mandated background process.

This seems like a reasonable explanation, given that it fits my experience as well. My work Macbook Pro often is quite laggy when JAMF decides to scan everything (i.e. for several minutes after booting up and periodically throughout the day afterwards), whereas my Linux personal machines are almost always quite snappy, even with games running at fairly high performance settings through WINE at the same time as Firefox, discord, sometimes VS Code, etc.

Yeah my 2020 work MacBook is always blasting its fans because corporate IT installed some monitoring software that is scanning everything all the time. The laptop is a nuclear hazard site cuz it’s so hot all the time. I need headphones on to drown out the fan noise.

That last gen Intel Macbooks overheat so easily.

The corporate security software is so awful mine stays at an ambient temperature of around 60°c with the constant background tasks. That can't be good for the hardware.

Same! My cats greatly prefer when I'm at my desk working compared to personal time because my work laptop (a Macbook plugged into a monitor and kept shut) gets so warm and they love to sleep on it.

Lol, that’s just silly. I could probably run Linux desktop (sway) on a 1GB RAM machine.

My early professional daily driver Linux workstations had 32-64MB of memory.

I laugh at discussions like this. Linux with a slim window manager and vim can run on just about anything and provide a productive programming environment for a codebase of virtually any size provided you can use a remote system for compiles and a slim browser like elinks to access online documentation.

That said my primary workstation runs separate VMs for every application for high security, so I appreciate my 64 cores and 256gb of memory these days.

1 GB would require some serious optimization if you want to do some work. But I have a 2 GB machine running Xubuntu without modifications and it is quite usable for some development work (It was bought as a school laptop years ago. You could not use it in school anymore because their stuff requires 4 GB nowadays, but I sometimes still use it just for fun.) I don't think switching from Xfce to sway saves you a whole GB.

Of course there were numerous ways to make a 2 GB machine starve if you wanted to or just don't think what is feasible or not and run several crazy Electron apps or worse. Some lightweight containers are not a problem, I have run those.

My first Linux machine ran on 8MB RAM. Ok, could be that some modern software would not run well on such a thing any more and a modern web browser is unthinkable.

When I studied computer science the VAX-750 had 4 MB and 15 students could compile at the same time from each their terminal. Swapping got a bit annoying under those conditions, but in the evening when a couple of them had gone home it started to run smoothly.

I remember phones from 20 years ago using something like 150 kB, admittedly they had no real operating system, just a simple task scheduler. Probably color display required a bit more already.