tkms

The RAM footprints of most development tools on Linux are also less than on other operating systems, due to shared libraries and not just shipping every dependency bundled with binaries. A developer on OSX told me he was close to maxing out his 16gigs of RAM, blaming it on having to run 2 vagrant VMs simultaneously while working. While I wasn't able to establish a conclusive cause of his sizeable memory consumption (he was busy), I spun up 3 vagrant VMs of my own, simulated work, and opened/visited many more sites in Firefox to try to hog resources. I could hardly break 4 gigs of RAM used (out of 16), in Ubuntu 14.04. 8 gigs might not actually be so bad if you're doing development work using tools that aren't shipped as complete packages, but rather adhere to the unix philosophy.

Gen. Alexander's talk at Def Con 2012 sounded pretty earnest, too...