In 2005 I was able to run Linux on 512MB RAM _without_ swap (on purpose - every day) without issues. Today it will bark at me on 8GB of RAM for not having swap enabled.
I'm running on an 8GB Linux box without swap and never even come close to running out of memory. If I don't have any VMs running, then it's pretty unusual for me to use much more than 1-2 gigs. It's interesting... one of my colleagues has serious problems with performance because he keeps running out of memory -- and I don't think he's doing anything unusual.
I think there is something wrong with some of the major distros. I got really fed up with Ubuntu because of random junk running without my approval and eventually migrated to Arch simply because I have a lot more control over configuration. I don't mean to trash one distro over another because each one has its strengths and weaknesses, but I'm been surprised at how bloated the average Linux install is these days. I'd love it if there was more attention paid to it.
> I'm running on an 8GB Linux box without swap and never even come close to running out of memory. If I don't have any VMs running, then it's pretty unusual for me to use much more than 1-2 gigs. It's interesting... one of my colleagues has serious problems with performance because he keeps running out of memory -- and I don't think he's doing anything unusual.
64gb here and 40gb used. Firefox alone uses 2 gigs with a mere ~30 tabs.
I run KDE, Firefox, Slack (browser based app), Chromium, VS Code (browser based app) (plus Gvim, shell etc) on Arch and it's currently steady at 3.9 GB (of 16)
Browsers have a tendency to use some percentage of available RAM. Firefox using 40gigs on a 64gig machine doesn't mean it'll try to use 40gigs on a 8gig machine.
I think there is something wrong with some of the major distros. I got really fed up with Ubuntu because of random junk running without my approval and eventually migrated to Arch simply because I have a lot more control over configuration. I don't mean to trash one distro over another because each one has its strengths and weaknesses, but I'm been surprised at how bloated the average Linux install is these days. I'd love it if there was more attention paid to it.