[jyrkesh]

That's not even close to an exaggeration. I'm running only half those things (or their competitive equivalents) right now on a Windows box. I just checked and I've got 14.8 GBs in use.

Fortunately, I have a Dell XPS 15 with 32 GBs of RAM, but the second I start up a single VM, one more messaging app, a small handful of Docker containers, or any IDE (of which I'm running none right now), I'm going over 16 GBs.

Realistically, most of us on HN probably need around 20-24 GBs, but laptops don't come in those increments.

[jfkebwjsbx]

> of us on HN probably need around 20-24 GBs

I develop for a living. I use 6 GB including a browser, a VM and an IDE.

Some of you greatly exaggerate the needs. Some workflows require 16+ GB of RAM, but most people complaining about RAM mismanage it or do not understand that caches are not mandatory.

[asdff]

I'm running firefox and mail in macOS, and 12gb are in use. The OS keeps things loaded in memory if you have it to spare.

[thiht]

Right now on macOS I'm running Firefox, Outlook, 2 VSCode instances, Postman, 1 Electron chat app and another chat app and I'm under 5GB. Uptime 4 days.

[jfkebwjsbx]

Cache does not count when discussing memory requirements.