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lol how much ram does that need when they’re shipping every bit of data on your computer to their servers to do processing on there?
Why not outsource the power usage and hardware costs to the consumer and just reap the end result?
Meh, Windows itself, even with all the bloat still active, doesn’t need more than 2 Gigs. That’s one of the few issues microsoft isn’t responsible for.
Try using it on a 2 or 4 GB machine. It’s pretty much impossible.
I love to bash MS, but this feels like an industry-wide trend to /never/ care about optimizing beyond the bar of “typical specs of new devices in rich countries”. I’m guessing it’s just to limit labor costs, and computers are less-rapidly-improving than the 90s/00s?
Code optimization has pretty much fallen by the way side since ram prices keep going down and cpu performance keeps improving.
Why spend the time if you don’t have to?
Browsers are some of the worst culprits.
Browser canvas is one of the worst culprits: it has to keep a buffer with an uncompressed bitmap several screens in size.
Old browsers used to keep a single screen worth of canvas buffer, then redraw stuff as you scrolled… which made it a horrible experience. You can still find some of that with “clever” web designs where they replace fonts or move things dynamically as you scroll.
Then you have websites with “infinite scroll” that just keep increasing the canvas buffer size more and more and more, to infinity and beyond… and people wonder why their Facebook or Reddit tabs use so much RAM.
Just for the sake of a beautiful audited and blazingly fast codebase that tuns qo good that Raspberry Pi user can run your stuff too.
I love optimisation!
premature optimization is the root of all evil - Donald Knuth
which does not excuse a total lack of optimization, but gotta hit those kpi’s
if it remember it correctly it was said in relation to algorithm optimization > code optimization
If Microsoft wants more RAM just to do AI shit on my computer, I’d rather have even less just to make sure they cant.
Be careful with what you wish for… if they can’t do it on your computer, then they’ll send your data to the cloud to do it there.
You now understand why I constantly run at 10 bytes below my OS drive’s limit. They cant take consent away if what they want to do is physically impossible. Sure you can delete some temporary files but that’s only going to net you 1GB max. Good fucking luck.
It already should have that. 8 GB is the absolute bare fucking minimum for most computers these days, but unless you have 16, it’s a generally unpleasant experience.
For windows, yes. For Linux and OSx, 8gb si still ok for most usecase
While 8GB is typically enough for Linux today, it may not be enough a few years from now. Buying a laptop with 8GB of soldered in RAM would limit the useful life of it.
It will probably depend on distro. Some distros might get more bloated, but I think most won’t do anything that makes them unusable on lower-spec hardware, especially those that specifically have low system requirements as one of their core tenets.
Everything seems to get more bloated over time. An 8GB system probably won’t become unusable soon, but things will certainly begin to run less smoothly to the point that many people would replace the computer. Browsers and electron apps are RAM hogs.
It depends on the use case, but for what it’s worth on a 4GB Android tablet, I can run VSCode + Chromium/Firefox via Termux without too much trouble. ~2GB of memory is taken by Android, so 8GB on a proper Linux system is more like 3x more memory available. It would take a massive amount of bloat to make an impact. My main concern would like with websites being wasteful with both memory and CPU usage via JS, rather than the browser itself becoming bloated.
Just to run the OS sure, but what about the ever enlarging bloated software?
That would depend largely on the use-case and specific software. I’m fairly confident that Lyx isn’t going to become bloated any time soon, but I can see that happening especially with proprietary alternatives like Word (ignoring for a moment Word isn’t on Linux). It all really depends on whether or not a less bloated alternative exists.
With 8G oom killer will kill my Firefox process.
I was evaluating Linux desktop prior to switching my work pc to Linux with an 8G VM and it wasn’t enough for just browsing and general tinkering.
Yep, browsing, developing, listening to music all alright on 8GB, could probably run on even 4.
My memory idles on around 3341MiB with a browser and just a few basic daemons like Syncthing used in mint cinnamaon. 4GB is pretty tight unless you are willing to make some behavioural changes or use a less friendly distro. But 8GB is more than enough.
Different story trying to run VMs on my server, though.
I have 8 and am able to play 4x games at high settings w/o significant lag until late game lol. People really tend to blow this one out of proportion. Unless you’re an incredibly heavy user you probably don’t need more than 8 and 16 still feels luxurious.
“Incredibly heavy user” here, my Windows 11 boots into 9GB thanks to a few tools and a LibreOffice preloader… then gets close to 16GB the moment I start a few VMs and some dev containers in VSCode.
Fortunately, when I got this laptop on a -50% sale with just 8GB, I made sure that I’d be able to add a 32GB memory stick… so now it keeps running with up to 20GB of cache, and it flies.
Compared to the average person, yes, you are a very heavy user. Most people use their laptop for little more than browsing the internet.
I browse the internet on a phone or a tablet… don’t really get people who use a laptop just for that. Running some office software, is the minimum I see as the need for a laptop, when it isn’t drawing, 2D or 3D design, audio/video, or something programming related. Maybe gaming, but there seem to be better options for that too (either a desktop, a Steam Deck, a console, or a phone/tablet again).
8 GB is the absolute bare fucking minimum for most computers these days
I keep seeing this statement all around the web but it is still amazing that we need that much RAM even for today.
Don’t get me wrong, I know 8 GB is becoming the standard even for mobile phones, so it is only logical to assume to bump this number for PCs (why no 12 GBS of RAM? IDK) and I have been using 16 GBs of RAM for 10 years now, it is a MacBook Pro and for me Apple does not make it clear to see how much of that RAM I’m actually using… Regardless RAM has never been a problem for me, with casual usage, and I always thought 8 GBs should work the same for even a lighter usage, why do I say that? Because before moving to such a Mac I used a laptop with 4 GBs of RAM around 2011-2014 and it was a pain in the ass to use (the processor was shit as well) for simple navigation for my thesis… So yeah if you think 8 GBs is bad, try 4 GBs.
Another reason I think 8 GBs is “a high amount for casual usage” is that my work PC had also 4 GBs of RAM, but there was not a reason to hoard tabs and such, so it was very manageable (also the processor wasn’t shit, but it was like a Core i5 or something like that, the usual office PCs you see and know), if we are talking about bottlenecks it would be the shitty HDD speeds LMAO.
What I think you guys all mean with 8 GBs of RAM is the bare minimum for nowadays standard is if you use it for IT related topics or you like to hoard stuff in it (which ain’t bad, unused RAM is wasted RAM after all) or simply depend on heavy programs which ain’t the web browser, for casuals I’d say 6 GBs would be a fair number, although it is not usual, and fuck 4 GBs of RAM in 2024, for any kind of device lol (I bet offices still use that dog shit).
Anyway I’d personally aim for 16 GBs of RAM or more regardless, for any of my future purchases, because I like to keep my stuff for years to come.
I am on the poorer side and living in one of the central European countries (yeah I’m a teen)
I only have a core 2 duo desktop with 3 GB of ram and a laptop with a i5 also with 3gb of ram, both only HDD machines
The desktop now runs Linux, but because it has components even Intel doesn’t want to list on their website (the mobo) it runs it pretty poorly (also I bricked it somehow not run windows or any other usb install media, which is a big problem), the laptop runs windows 7 (it literally refuses to open the update utility I downloaded from MS’s website, so that’s that, two obsolete machines, that are absolutely horrendous to do anything with (not to mention my shitty 350$ phone is more powerful than both of them combined)
why no 12 GBS of RAM? IDK
Because computing architecture is based around powers of 2, and having memory that follows that pattern is more efficient.
What I think you guys all mean with 8 GBs of RAM is the bare minimum for nowadays standard is if you use it for IT related topics or you like to hoard stuff in it (which ain’t bad, unused RAM is wasted RAM after all) or simply depend on heavy programs which ain’t the web browser,
I would disagree. Even casual usage these days is much more demanding than it once was. Try having Chrome, Spotify, and Discord open all at once. You’re going to start pushing that 8 GB further than you’d imagine. Plus, look at the new apple silicon macbooks. They put 8 GB in as the baseline saying shit like “since we designed it to all work together, it’s more efficient”, and real world test have shown that to be complete nonsense.
4 GB is completely unacceptable for deskop/laptop usage and would be a miserable, if not nearly unusable experience.
16 GB right now is definitely the baseline any new machine should have. I have a MacBook Pro from 2015 that has 16 GB and it still feels reasonably comfortable to use.
I do agree with your central premise here that it’s absurd that we need so much. But it’s just what happens as hardware advances, software developers push the limits of what the hardware can handle. Either that, or they’re just lazy and don’t bother optimizing since they think the machine can handle it (looking at you Chrome devs, and anyone who uses Electron).
Because computing architecture is based around powers of 2, and having memory that follows that pattern is more efficient.
But what about Android phones? I see there are not many issues on that side with that amount.
Try having Chrome, Spotify, and Discord open all at once. You’re going to start pushing that 8 GB further than you’d imagine.
Yeah, I see a pattern here, all of that is Chrome lol.
My former work PC (which I mentioned before) that had 4 GBs of RAM required to be running always Windows 11 with Chrome, Microsoft Dynamics, Outlook, Microsoft Word, Excel, Sumatra PDF and some other few apps, so yeah I agree it was miserable, but I remember I could have Spotify as well, and AFAIK there are still Chromebooks shipped with 4 GBs of RAM? Granted they are more alike to a phone than a PC.
(looking at you Chrome devs, and anyone who uses Electron).
Definitely, my girlfriend uses a lot Notion on my Mac, and while the RAM isn’t an issue there we can see the fans spinning non stop when it is in use lol, I told her to open it on a Firefox tab and it was much much quieter.
why no 12 GBS of RAM?
Because there were no 6 or 12 GB modules. But that changes with DDR5
My Win10 PC with just my default apps open, which is mainly Firefox, Steam, a few other Launchers, Obsidian and Messaging clients - 8GB definitly doesn’t cut it today anymore. Running a newer game smashes the 16GB border easily.
8GB was the bare minimum in 2010. It’s amazing how the increase of memory just stopped.
Didn’t memory get heaps expensive for a while there?
I seem to remember that, for a couple years after DDR4 became the standard, it was significantly more expensive than DDR3.
That’s the thing. WHY should it need that? What is the OS doing that could possibly justify that level of memory use?
- The browser
- Electron apps
- Prefetching
- AI shit/telemetry
Other than a browser, I had none of these on my Linux machine and I could comfortably run on 4GB of RAM
My new PC has 64g ram. But I’m also not using or plan to use windows. Checkmate M$!
But in all seriousness, 8g is like, the foundational minimum these days. Sad tbh. Browsers are so bloated these days. I’m surprised that browsers haven’t become their own OS yet. It kinda feels that way in some environments.
Phones are coming with 12GB and Apple are still only putting 8Gb in their ‘pro’ line.
🙃
Does it really matter though that iPhone has less RAM? Their architecture is super efficient and can get by with less than android bloat.
Oh not their phones. Their $1799 14” MacBook Pro.
₼ac฿ook ₽ro
Well, Chrome OS is a thing.
ChromeOS is more of an OS built to optimize a browser though. Its close though.
I do have 16GB RAM, but that’s not because I wanted to run just the OS and without a game.
My next OS will be some kind of Linux. I just had to reinstall Windows 11 because it corrupted it’s install after some time. I had to uninstall so much crap and regedit so many thinks just to get it back to where I was before. I don’t want Bing search in my windows search results. I don’t want your stupid widgets and I don’t want your browser or 90% of your default apps. And no I don’t want office 360 or onedrive. So stop forcing it into my face. When Linux gets Plasma 6 and HDR support there is only holding me back my Nvidia GPUs Linux compatibility. While I hah to install windows 11 again I played a lot of games on my Steam Deck! It’s is awesome and only some games with obscure anti cheat don’t run. (well some times they don’t run on windows too)
nvidia opensourced their drivers because of that lapsus kid.
the community is already building a state of the art open driver for nvidia 2xxxx and above.
only a matter of time, but even then nvidia is pretty usable with the proprietary drivers nowadays.
Just saying, but tweaking stuff via regedit is a surefire way to get your Windows install corrupted sooner or later.
dism, sfc… and disabling the preview update channel, are your friends to have a stable Windows install.
If you don’t want Bing results in your search, then use something like Everything to search for files. It’s faster, and will only show you files, all of them.
The widgets you can disable, and with Powertoys even bypass the start menu completely.
I may have 128Gb in my current rig (Dell Precision T7610), but if this is the way you’re gonna be bloating Windows 12, imma gonna be running to OpenSUSE or some BSD.
Yes, I use Win10Privacy to lobotomize all of the spyware and cruftware that comes with Windows. But it’s gotta be re-run after every significant Windows update.
linux needs like 1gb of ram and some distros even less
Strictly speaking, “Linux” can run on 10MB of RAM or less.
Meanwhile, a single web page may need 100MB or more to build the DOM, run all scripts, and keep a buffer of the canvas.
256MB on my old NAS running OpenMediaVault.
Actually only 22% of the memory used, even while streaming audio. just the cpu fluctuates feom 0% to 70%
Looking at this prompted me to set the proper date after yesterdays reboot
Already switched to linux
I have 32 gigs of ram and this shit is going to make me switch to Linux as well.
I do not want an OS that demands half of my processing power just to run in the background. I see absolutely no reason for an OS to demand 2-4 gigs of ram, let alone up to 16
Oh no! I won’t be able to run Windows on my new MacBook Pro!
New macbook Pro doesnt even have 16GB?? Do they come with a 32GB SSD too?
AFAIK is the basic configuration for the new M3 MacBook Pro a meager 8gb shared RAM with 512gb SSD for 1999 Euros (in Germany so ymmv).
But the base model M3 MBP is almost an entirely different product to the rest of the MBP lineup.
They really should’ve removed the pro moniker from that sku.
I assume it’s entirely marketing bullshit, whether to say “look how cheap a MBP is!” or to make you think “wow, it’s only a little bit more to get the way better model, what a bargain!”
I have 16gb on my M2 Air, and 8gb on my 2014 mini. I’m genuinely surprised at how usable that mini still is. Hell, it’s running Sonoma through OCLP, but it’s only when I boot up the Win11 VM I have installed that it really starts to struggle.
I honestly just made a double pun regarding the new MB Pro with 8gb in the basic configuration and the coming Windows with the 16gb requirement - which both seem strange product decisions with lots of negative customer feedback.
My next Windows PC doesn’t need any RAM, because I’m not going to need one.
Jesus Christ, what are they doing? Emulating the OS in fucking Minecraft!?
The article mentions AI. 16gigs feels far too little to run a LLM of respectable size so I wonder what exactly this means? Feels like no one is gonna be happy about a 16gig LLM (high RAM usage and bad AI features)
Of fucking course it’s AI, why the hell wouldn’t it be AI. For fuck sake, it’s like they want their users to switch to Linux.
No 16 gigs is ok for an LLM
On your gpu
JavaOS
Wait, we talking dedotated wam?!
Plausibily, they could be trying to dictate the minimum standard for budget laptops, win11 doesn’t really need a TPM, it’s in the minimum spec so that every laptop is forced to have one.
Microsoft are such weirdos. It’s like they’re trying to empower Google, who will lap up all of the users they abandon as they install Chrome OS, because let’s be honest, the average Jo seldom just installs Linux, so they’ll say, “oh I’ve heard of Chrome, let me try that”
Average users aren’t going to be installing an OS.
No, they’re going to buy a Chromebook instead of a Windows laptop
Does anyone outside of some schools buy chromebooks?
Yes :( Unfortunately Chromebooks are really cheap here, and countless people are hooked already to Google products because of their Android phones already, so the choice is easy for them I figure.
That’s crazy, I’ve never seen anyone use them here in Australia.
I think because every business has its own little proprietary windows app they need to use for this or that.
Good for you. Recently I visited a family I’m friendly with, and noticed that the parents and the two young kids exclusively use a few Chromebooks. I think this boils down to do with the popularity of web based email (Google) and other services. And banks are pushing for customers to use phone apps.
And most people just use a web browser apparently. Oh, and HP printers that break every few weeks. “Hey, you’re a programmer, fix my printer.”
Meanwhile, chrome and desktop apps (Electron-based) like Slack, note apps, etc, takes 1GB just to open… Well, tbh I don’t know if they really use physical RAM space, but anyway.
Yes and no.
On modern OSs, files get mapped into RAM, which is a fancy way of saying “it can stay on disk, but it can also be cached in RAM, but the unmodified parts can get discarded out of cache at any moment, and any changes go first to RAM, then get written to disk at some later time”.
The apps also use buffers to hold data, and one of the largest buffers is for the canvas or window display buffer. These have to use actual RAM while the app is running; you can only swap them out to swap/pagefile if you suspend the app… which is doable, but rarely done… otherwise they’ll get swapped back in, the moment the app needs them (which usually is all the time… but some buffers might stay mostly swapped out some of the time).
There is also RAM compression going on (at least on Windows), that can keep mostly empty and/or rarely used buffers all the time “in RAM”, but taking just a fraction of the space.
