I have 8GB in my laptop running mint, its used for browsing, office work, 3D print slicing, and occasionally I torrent a file from it…it is absolutely no issue whatsoever and it never even breaks 4GB use unless it’s actively slicing a 3D model. 16GB minimum I can agree with for gaming, but for desktop use as mentioned above you can easily get by with less.
for desktop use as mentioned above you can easily get by with less.
Sure, as long as you’re willing to deal with the performance hit of constantly swapping to disk.
Even SSD drives are a magnitude slower that any modern RAM stick, so you’re adding TONS of processing time by running that little memory. And gods help you if your swap is on spinning rust…
SSDs are fast enough as swap to be imperceptible to the untrained eye. A good test is to disable swap for a while. You can bet they will see their system grind its gears at some point.
Operating systems are designed with the assumption that swap will be used. 32GB is roughly the waterline where you can forgo it all together while avoiding consequenecs of the code freaking out when it needs it and doesn’t have any.
I have 8GB in my laptop running mint, its used for browsing, office work, 3D print slicing, and occasionally I torrent a file from it…it is absolutely no issue whatsoever and it never even breaks 4GB use unless it’s actively slicing a 3D model. 16GB minimum I can agree with for gaming, but for desktop use as mentioned above you can easily get by with less.
Sure, as long as you’re willing to deal with the performance hit of constantly swapping to disk.
Even SSD drives are a magnitude slower that any modern RAM stick, so you’re adding TONS of processing time by running that little memory. And gods help you if your swap is on spinning rust…
SSDs are fast enough as swap to be imperceptible to the untrained eye. A good test is to disable swap for a while. You can bet they will see their system grind its gears at some point.
Operating systems are designed with the assumption that swap will be used. 32GB is roughly the waterline where you can forgo it all together while avoiding consequenecs of the code freaking out when it needs it and doesn’t have any.
If that was the case I wouldn’t have 4GB of idle ram just sitting in my PC. There is no unloading to swap when 50% of available ram is unused.
you did notice the person you are replying to is using linux, right?
they are correct, 16gb goes a loooooong way in linux. I know begause I too have 16 on my work and gaming rig and ram has never been a bottleneck
your comments sound like typical windows experience
You can run it on 8GB. Doesnt mean you won’t benefit from more.
Your system outsources the memory to swap space or is memory starved and needs to unload programs.