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by mancerayder1 days ago |
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upvoteby Aurornis1 days ago|
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There’s been a sharp divergence in memory requirements. Talk to developers and they think that 32GB is the bare minimum these days, with 64GB or more preferred. They’ll point to Electron and Chrome tabs and everything else.

Then you sit down with an average computer user on their 8GB RAM MacBook Neo and they’re in love with how fast and smooth it is, even with their chrome tabs and the company Slack up and Spotify in the background.

I still have an older 8GB machine to kick around with on the go when I don’t want to haul the expensive laptop. It’s fine, even for a lot of development.

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upvoteby Schlagbohrer1 days ago|
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How do you explain this discrepancy? Is it because the OS is agressively fencing in and pruning these wasteful software?
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upvoteby ack_complete1 days ago|
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Some tasks simply require more RAM. Compiling big software, for instance, wants as many CPU cores as it can get, and each compiler instance needs some amount of RAM to run efficiently. It's not unusual for a 32-core build to need 32-64GB of RAM to run at full speed. Work on a smaller program, though, and 16GB is absolutely fine.
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upvoteby pmontra1 days ago|
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Because they use one or two apps at at time, the ones they must spend all their time to perform their job. E.g. Excel and a web app to work on invoices and a stack of paper documents. I see 8 GB on Windows PCs too.
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upvoteby master_crab1 days ago|
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Containers is often the reason. You start a container and you are immediately pulling in a quarter to half a gig or more (often the latter).
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upvoteby tancop1 days ago|
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[dead]
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upvoteby markus_zhang1 days ago|
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I think it would be better if one has the discipline to just use older machines and play older games and only visit certain websites that can be visited on older version of browsers. A second-hand 16GB laptop can go a long way.

But yeah that probably sucks from time to time, especially for young people.

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upvoteby loloquwowndueo1 days ago|
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Second-hand? lol my main driver has 16gb and just peachy. What do you folks do that needs so much ram to browse the web.
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upvoteby ryukoposting1 days ago|
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My laptop has 8 GB. I write blog posts, I have a dozen-ish tabs open, I do KiCAD things (including 3D renders!). Works great. I was doing Verilog synthesis on a similar machine in college in 2020.

The truth is that, if you do the same things you were doing with your computer 10 years ago, well then you don't need a new computer!

If all you do is write books, a Pentium III will do the job just as well as a brand new PC.

Of course, the web throws a wrench in this. Word 2003 is still far more capable than Google Docs, yet tons of people opt for the cloud slop because it's convenient and free-as-in-beer. And, Google Docs will continue to become less efficient with time.

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upvoteby zahlman1 days ago|
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> only visit certain websites that can be visited on older version of browsers. A second-hand 16GB laptop can go a long way.

My desktop has 8 and I have no problem keeping multiple tabs open using up-to-date Firefox.

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upvoteby pishpash1 days ago|
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You can do a lot on old machines but developers also need to optimize a bit. Youtube almost plays on a 20-year-old machine, which means with some effort it'll play just fine. Most the other sites work just fine.
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