[foldr]

>[1] The big one for me is that I can't run the Atom text editor, Firefox, and a virtual machine all at the same time.

Is this on Linux? I have no problem with that workload on an 8GB Macbook Air (2019). I was apprehensive about going with the 8GB model, but I've not really had any issues.

I wonder if memory compression on OS X helps here.

[wolfgang42]

Yes, this is Linux. I say "can't run" but what I really mean is that things start to get slower after a while until eventually it becomes annoying. This is probably in part due to my habit of accumulating open tabs and windows, and also because I run KDE which is pretty memory-hungry on its own. If you don't do this or you're the sort of person who shuts down your computer every night you might never see this problem so it's hard to compare just based on the list of programs.

[snazz]

Are you swapping to the “VM” section of your APFS container on an insanely fast PCIe (NVMe?) SSD? That’s my guess. Although macOS does a great job of handling poorly behaved programs that use tons of RAM just to begin with.

[foldr]

I'm sure the fast SSD helps to mitigate the relatively small amount of RAM, yes. I can't say to what extent.