[imtringued]

>RAM is cheap

This is the wrong mindset. RAM is only cheap if you don't use it. As soon as you go just 1 byte over the maximum RAM it turns into the most precious resource of the entire computer.

If an app uses more memory than another then it is not better because RAM is cheap. It is better because it provides more or higher quality features at a reasonable cost of increased memory usage. But at the same time it is also worse for people who do not need those features.

Here is an example: When I launch the graphical file manager nautlius it consumes roughly 26 MB of RAM showing my home folder but when I go to my "Pictures" folder it suddenly shoots up to 300MB. There is a reason for that and it is not "RAM is cheap", if that were the case it would always use 300MB regardless of what I do with it (electron apps are a major offender of this). Nautlis consumes that much RAM because it has more features like displaying 1000 thumbnails of all those pictures.

Now this feature would get in my way if I set up something like a Raspberry Pi Zero to take a photo every hour. Nautilus will crash because it needs too much memory to display the thumbnails.

[laumars]

I agree from an idealistic point of view (I've often make the same argument myself with regards to non-native applications and self-indulgent GUIs) but you're missing the context of the argument here.

We're not talking about burning through hundreds of megabytes (nor even gigs) on a pretty UI that adds no extra function; we are talking about only a few megabytes to save stressing low bandwidth endpoints.

It isn't 1990 any more, sacrificing a few megabytes of RAM in favour of greater stability is very much a worthwhile gain in my opinion. Hence why I say RAM is cheap - we don't need to cut every corner just to save a few bytes here and there.

In the example we were discussing, the idle RAM usage was higher because it doesn't hammer low bandwidth endpoints with frequent rescans. Caching is actually a pretty usage for spare RAM - your kernel does it too. So we are not talking about anything out of the ordinary here and we're certainly not talking about wasting RAM for the sake of wasting RAM. We're talking about trading some cheap RAM for the sake of potentially expensive (computationally speaking) access times.

However I do feel I need to reiterate a point I've said throughout this discussion: there is no right or wrong way; it's just a matter of compromise. eg the goals for an embedded system would be different to the goals for an CLI tool on a developers laptop.