this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
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[–] [email protected] 109 points 6 days ago (3 children)

I guess RAM is a bell curve now.

  • 32GB: Enough.
  • 16GB: Not enough.
  • 8GB: Not enough.
  • 4GB: Believe it or not, enough.
[–] [email protected] 48 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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 6 points 6 days ago (3 children)

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!

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[–] AusatKeyboardPremi 7 points 6 days 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

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[–] aesthelete 41 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 days ago (1 children)

The underlying issue is that nobody wants to develop using any of the available cross-platform toolkits that you can compile into native binaries without an entire browser attached. You could use Qt or GTK to build a cross-platform application. But if you use Electron, you can just run the same application on the browser AND as a standalone application.

Me? I'm considering developing my next application in Qt out of all things because it does actually have web support via WASM and I want to learn C++ and gain some Qt experience. Good idea? Probably not.

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[–] Buddahriffic 8 points 5 days ago (1 children)

It's like so many programmers never evolve past the "playing around with web dev stuff" days. The fact that JavaScript is one of the most used languages is appalling.

The whole 1+1 = 11 meme made me laugh and then avoid JavaScript whenever possible, but I wonder if many others saw it and thought, "now I've gained more experience in JavaScript!"

[–] aesthelete 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

I will also never understand how JavaScript development has gotten so complicated with seemingly zero benefits. It takes minutes to do a "frontend build" and the output grows larger all of the time. I bumped into some Angular crap that was hundreds of megabytes somehow, and still AJAX fetched the same info 4x on page load because the "MVCC" or whatever it's called didn't even buy them the abstraction of using the same values multiple times on one page...

[–] Buddahriffic 3 points 5 days ago

Yeah it's ridiculous with every small app needing to be packaged with a full DOM and maybe even an http server for all I know and what should have been a few kb ends up being 1000x that or more.

[–] HStone32 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

You know, I've always loved C and doing my own memory management. I love learning optimization techniques and applying them.

But you know what? Everybody around me keeps saying I'm being silly. They keep telling me I won't find any jobs like that. They say I should just swallow my juvenile preferences and go with what's popular, chasing trends for the entire rest of my career.

I don't think you can blame people for trending away from quality software. Its clearly against the grain.

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 6 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] ZILtoid1991 16 points 6 days ago (3 children)

I want normal applications, that run on my computer I have at home!

hank hill jpeg meme.jpg

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[–] foggy 10 points 6 days ago

Also, massive security surfaces.

Any music producer is familiar with 3rd party license managers like ilok that make you use their Shit-ass electron application that gets an update once every few years.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 6 days ago

Apple: Enough!

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

[–] [email protected] 26 points 6 days ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago (2 children)

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

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[–] Matriks404 11 points 6 days ago (1 children)

8 GB is fine for basic tasks and it won't change anytime soon.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago
[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 days ago

16gb and a number less than 16gb both not being big enough numbers is making me crack up

[–] Zachariah 17 points 6 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

128 GB here which runs out if I compile the complete project at work with -j32. And this sucks because 128 GB right now means the RAM cannot run super fast, meaning it is a bottleneck to any modern Ryzen...

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 days ago (1 children)

256GiB here, i sometimes need to run chrome

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 days ago

And you think that's enough?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago

I remember all the windows users saying 16gb of ram is enough

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)
[–] Im_Him 1 points 3 days ago

Started learning flutter a week ago, hopefully it pays off and I get a good job :)

[–] jroid8 16 points 6 days ago

I only run out of ram (16GB) when I'm playing minecraft with 280 mods

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago

This is currently me with modded Kerbal Space Program and Cities: Skylines lol

[–] RangerJosie 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

16 was enough. A decade ago.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago

2TB NVME dedicated entirely to virtual memory

[–] _stranger_ 5 points 5 days ago

I think someone needs to update that old "if programming languages were weapons". JavaScript is a cursed hammer.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

8GB is enough for me, but my laptop usually only has GNOME, Orca, and Cinny running.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 days ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] bruhduh 8 points 6 days ago

zram to the rescue

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago (3 children)

With only Codium, Firefox, Spotify and Signal I get close to 16GB :(

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 days 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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 days ago

I was happy with 16GB until i inherited a huge Angular legacy project.

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