8GB of ram is more than fine for work as long as you have plenty of SSD space and don’t use Apple Intelligence.
People forget that MacOS is UNIX at its core.
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BigTrout75@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
I can’t speak for Macs. But in the Linux world, 8GB is fine. In Windows it’s awful because of all that bloat. I’m guessing Macs fair better for OS efficiency.
8GB of ram is more than fine for work as long as you have plenty of SSD space and don’t use Apple Intelligence.
People forget that MacOS is UNIX at its core.
in the Linux world, 8GB is fine
Yeahhhhh no
But it is for most people.
Again, no.
Most people still browse bloated websites, doesn’t matter what OS you’re using 8GB is going to be tight.
As a web developer… what?? If your website needs 8GB on the client to run there are serious, deeply ingrained problems with your front end. I recent scoffed at coworkers who wanted 8GB to just one instance of the web server.
And that’s why we have adblockers
Been enough for me.
Different people use computers for different things you know.
I use my computer for simple tasks and can power through double that pretty easily. My family is full of Mac sheep who are constantly coming to me to make their computers faster and I have to tell them I can’t help because their machine was deliberately kneecapped by the OEM and there’s no way to fix it. Fortunately one of them just upgraded to the new Air w/ 16GB and they remark how much faster it is. Obviously it’s faster in lots of other ways, but none of those would do anything if they were still capped at 8GB.
My old laptop is running Pop!OS on 8gigs really well. I mostly do document editing, vector graphics, and a little light gaming. Have not updated to COSMIC yet so will see how that goes. I definitely dont load it up like my beefy desktop though.
I’m running Mint on an 8BG laptop and I’m surprised by just how much can be running at one time. Right now I’m running Firefox with 10 open tabs, Waterfox with 8 tabs, Thunderbird, Keepass, Calibre, Signal, a Whatsapp client, Syncthing, Libreoffice Writer with 2 open docs & Calc with 2 open small spreadsheets, a couple of terminals and Gedit, and didn’t even notice it until came across these comments. A friend who uses Windows 11 says 32GB is recommended now.
Microsoft must be thrilled with age verification being required at the OS level. What a great way to lock people into their Microslop garbage.
Right now I’m running Firefox with 10 open tabs,
Oh…I guess I’m the only one who opens firefox, and literally thousands of tabs.
One day I closed one window and it said “Are you sure you want to close 158 tabs?”
I said yes. It was one window. I had 23 more windows.
I rarely have more than 10 tabs open on my phone, and rarely more than 5 in my PC. How do people have so many tabs?
When I get to 20 or so I have to start closing some tabs to keep track of things. How do you find the tab you’re looking for when you have that many open?
Even without any extensions, there is a shortcut in Firefox to search and switch to a tab by typing % on the address bar
Zen (firefox (gecko) derivative, No AI, focus on decluttered interface) has bloody excellent tab management these days, workspaces, folders, horizontal tab lists (like sideberry), essentials (tab icons pinned to the top), auto unload, all built in, and everything disappears when reading a page.
Tab search.
Tab groups.
Color coding.
I use sideberry addon on Firefox and workspaces in Vivaldi.
Literally thousands? Have you tried bookmarking things after they’ve sat unused for awhile?
I typically just periodically save my browser windows with a tab manager extension. I just say because thousands sounds like way too much to keep track of…
Get Sideberry for your sanity.
addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/
I literally have over a thousand tabs open in one window.
8Gb ram. Mint. 10+ year old pc.
on my work PC at the moment (lovely little AMD 5700u mini-pc with 16Gb ram) I have a debloated LTSC build on W11 and two profiles of firefox running with a total of 25 tabs, a couple of them are more complex web apps but most are static pages, plus a couple of file browser, an old dumb custom invoicing app we use (~2003 application so its very light) and a VNC viewer with another machine running.
7.9gb of ram use.
it’s not that bad really, I mean it’s a lot for just mostly websites but we know they arent as light as they used to be, 8gb would be too little since I need some dedicated for Vram as I run 3 displays but I certainly dont need much more than 16.
I did have 32gb in this machine at first since I was doing some light photoshop and basic CAD/CAM, but it very rarely exceeded 16gb, so I cut it back and it’s been absolutely fine.
If you give windows more ram, it will use more ram as a baseline of course, unused ram is wasted ram.
I use mainly Linux but Mac is more efficient with RAM than Linux is also. By a significant amount.
What?
I use OSX for work and Linux on my personal laptop, that hasn’t been my experience at all
MacOS doesn’t shove the system UI components into swap when Firefox uses too much memory.
There are some advantages macOS can have but it depends on usage patterns and user knowledge:
Dynamic swap and zswap aren’t really the same as efficient ram usage it’s just good ways to mitigate when you run out. But when your using actual swap it’s in my experience more noticable on OSX than Linux, which at least for me remains responsive until you’re using a lot of swap.
Linux can share libraries too but users can run into situations where their applications use multiple different versions of Qt, GTK, etc. at the same time
Maybe Arch & Flatpak users hit this, but avoiding multiple versions of the same library is what distros exist for and avoiding loading different frameworks is what Desktop Environments are for. Although the ability to restore apps after closing them is pretty sweet and built in to OSX in a way that lets me safely kill apps to reduce the memory I’m using.
I think the main reason my Linux setup consumes less memory is probably because I used Kate for most file editing instead of vscode, which is probably an unfair advantage to Linux.
MacOS is like 6 gb of ram doing nothing
It’s basically iOS at that point.
CaptDust@sh.itjust.works 12 hours ago
Macs don’t have copilot so that’s like 4GB saved right there
BigTrout75@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Ha ha ha. True!