• prunerye@slrpnk.net
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    2 months ago

    I guess RAM is a bell curve now.

    • 32GB: Enough.
    • 16GB: Not enough.
    • 8GB: Not enough.
    • 4GB: Believe it or not, enough.
    • Artyom@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      I actually audibly laughed when Raspberry Pi came out with an 8GB version because for anyone who thinks 4GB isn’t enough probably won’t be happy with 8 either.

      • Valmond@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        I wonder what the hell they are doing with it? I mean I have the 3B with IIRC 1GB and I can use the desktop and run python scripts to fiddle with all the I/O ports and stuff, what do you do with a raspberry that needs eight times the RAM??

        I’m seriously curious!

    • AusatKeyboardPremi@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I have experienced this myself.

      My main machine at home - a M2 Pro MacBook with 32GB RAM - effortlessly runs whatever I throw at it. It completes heavy tasks in reasonable time such as Xcode builds and running local LLMs.

      Work issued machine - an Intel MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM - struggles with Firefox and Slack. However, development takes place on a remote server via terminal, so I do not notice anything beyond the input latency.

      A secondary machine at home - an HP 15 laptop from 2013 with an A8 APU and 8GB RAM (4GB OOTB) - feels sluggish at times with Linux Mint, but suffices for the occasional task of checking emails and web browsing by family.

      A journaling and writing machine - a ThinkPad T43 from 2005 maxed out with 2GB RAM and Pentium M - runs Emacs snappily on FreeBSD.

      There are a few older machines with acceptable usability that don’t get taken out much, except for the infrequent bout of vintage gaming

  • Gregor@gregtech.eu
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    2 months ago

    Have you even used Linux? 16GB of RAM is enough, even with electron apps

    • Lucy :3@feddit.org
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      2 months ago

      Not in my experience. The electron spotify app + electron discord app + games was too much. Replacing electron with dedicated FF instances worked tho.

      • UnityDevice@startrek.website
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        2 months ago

        About 6 months ago I upgraded my desktop from 16 to 48 gigs cause there were a few times I felt like I needed a bigger tmpfs.
        Anyway, the other day I set up a simulation of this cluster I’m configuring, just kept piling up virtual machines without looking cause I knew I had all the ram I could need for them. Eventually I got curious and checked my usage, I had just only reached 16 gigs.

        I think basically the only time I use more that the 16 gigs I had is when I fire up my GPU passthrough windows VM that I use for games, which isn’t your typical usage.

      • pat277@sh.itjust.works
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        2 months ago

        Even on windows, its hilarious to compare the RAM Discord uses. I caught the native app doing 2+gb, and Firefox beating it by… 100mb? I didnt compare ram usage too hard on my Stram Deck though between Flatpak and Firefox, but I expect firefox to be a bit better with its addons/plugins, like it was on windows

    • TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org
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      2 months ago

      We used to say 4GB is enough. And before that, a couple hundred MB. I’m staying ahead from now on, so I threw in 64GB. That oughtta last me for another 3/4 of a decade. I’m tired of doing the upgrade race for 30 years and want to be set for a while.

      I can literally trace my current Ryzen PC’s lineage like the ship of Theseus to an Athlon system I built in 2002. A replacement GPU here. Replacement mobo there. CPU here, etc.

      • BlueBockser@programming.dev
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        2 months ago

        That doesn’t mean anything. If you have tons of free RAM, programs tend to use more than strictly necessary because it speeds things up. That doesn’t mean they won’t run perfectly fine with 8GiB as well.

    • IsoSpandy@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      Man i remember. I have 16GB And running windows I would run out of ram so fast. Now on linux, I feel like I am unable to push the usage beyond 8GB in my regular workflow. I also switched to neovim from vscode, Firefox from Chrome and now only when I compile rust does my ram see any usage peaks.

    • Ziglin@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I have 4GB on my fedora i3 laptop and I am indeed able to open signal desktop, discord and 2 Firefox windows.

  • Delilah (She/Her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    2 months ago

    I hate electron apps. Just make a website asshole, don’t bundle a whole chrome browser! The only one I’ll tolerate is ferdium, because having a message control center is kinda neat.

  • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    The fact that electron both exists and is one of the most popular cross-platform development frameworks tells you everything you need to know about the current potato’d state of software development.

  • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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    2 months ago

    Apple: Enough!

    But you’ll have to buy a whole new laptop when it turns out that was a lie.

  • QuizzaciousOtter@lemm.ee
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    2 months ago

    I have no idea how people use so much RAM. I use a 16 GB machine for work and it runs perfectly. For the majority of the time I’m well below 8GB. And I do use Electron apps.

    Of course, I’m aware of the possible uses demanding more than 16 GB but I can’t believe this would be the case for a majority of the people.

    • ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
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      2 months ago

      The people who installed toolbars until half their screen was full are still around. Just now they keep 100 tabs open instead

    • skulkingaround@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      With just a web browser, teams, and visual studio open my work machine sits at 95% usage of 16gb. Half the time my compiles can’t even finish without getting axed by the oom killer. SSMS is a hog too, I often have to close half my stuff to get to work right.

      Supposed to be getting an upgrade but my company is taking their sweet time.

  • pacjo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 months ago

    I don’t know. I’m running 16gb with 8gb of swap just fine.

    Couple dozen tabs open in librewolf (across multiple windows), android studio with an emulator and some other utils. All under KDE Plasma on nixos unstable and it’s fine. It could be better, but it’s good enough.

  • oktoberpaard@feddit.nl
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    2 months ago

    The only time I can remember 16 GB not being sufficient for me is when I tried to run an LLM that required a tad more than 11 GB and I had just under 11 GB of memory available due to the other applications that were running.

    I guess my usage is relatively lightweight. A browser with a maximum of about 100 open tabs, a terminal, a couple of other applications (some of them electron based) and sometimes a VM that I allocate maybe 4 GB to or something. And the occasional Age of Empires II DE, which even runs fine on my other laptop from 2016 with 16 GB of RAM in it. I still ordered 32 GB so I can play around with local LLMs a bit more.

    • Todd Bonzalez@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      Yeah, but if you’re interested in running an LLM faster than 1 token per minute, RAM won’t matter. You’ll need as much VRAM as you can get.

      • oktoberpaard@feddit.nl
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        2 months ago

        Sure, but I’m just playing around with small quantized models on my laptop with integrated graphics and the RAM was insanely cheap. It just interests me what LLMs are capable of that can be run on such hardware. For example, llama 3.2 3B only needs about 3.5 GB of RAM, runs at about 10 tokens per second and while it’s in no way comparable to the LLMs that I use for my day to day tasks, it doesn’t seem to be that bad. Llama 3.1 8B runs at about half that speed, which is a bit slow, but still bearable. Anything bigger than that is too slow to be useful, but still interesting to try for comparison.

        I’ve got an old desktop with a pretty decent GPU in it with 24 GB of VRAM, but it’s collecting dust. It’s noisy and power hungry (older generation dual socket Intel Xeon) and still incapable of running large LLMs without additional GPUs. Even if it were capable, I wouldn’t want it to be turned on all the time due to the noise and heat in my home office, so I’ve not even tried running anything on it yet.

  • biggerbogboy@sh.itjust.works
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    2 months ago

    At least 8 is better than 4

    I retired my 4gb/120gb/celeron ThinkPad 11e today, since I’ve got a more powerful laptop lying around and I’ve used it for 8 years nonstop. It used to freeze up occasionally when there were more than 4 Firefox tabs open, and not to mention, my obsession with GNOME causing a shortage of system resources.

    Man that ThinkPad felt like family, I’m gonna miss using it.

  • AItoothbrush@lemmy.zip
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    2 months ago

    The most ram i ever used on my current system is prolly about 6gb. Most of the times its around 2-3gb most of it being system stuff and librefox. I have 16gb if i ever need it for some reason.