[mixmastamyk]

Uncles don’t let relatives buy less than 16gb ram. That has been my standard since ~2010 and our 2013 mbp is still running fine because I insisted on it.

I prefer FW for freedom reasons, that’s worth a few hundred as well as the ram. Would also wait for the new intel chipset that is more efficient however.

Finally I think the FW 12 is weirdly positioned, as the 13 is already thin and light. For a tablet, I recommend the Star Labs Starlite instead. Both in same package? Clunky.

Guess I’d recommend a used FW 13 and Starlite instead. That’s what I have now and no real reason to upgrade, and freedom to tinker is off the charts, perfect for a student.

[Mashimo]

> Uncles don’t let relatives buy less than 16gb ram. That has been my standard since ~2010 and our 2013 mbp is still running fine because I insisted on it.

Just last weekend I bought 8gb ram thinkpad t14 for an elderly relative. 240 EUR.

It replaces his thinkpad x220 where the fan and ssd slowly dies.

I doubt it becomes an issue, and if it does then I can upgrade it later.

[mixmastamyk]

You can do it once and spend an extra hundred dollars or do it twice, including occasional restrictions to the user. Poor tradeoff imho.

This is a young person with a long life ahead, we shouldn’t buy disposable ewaste with a short life.

[NicuCalcea]

Someone has to buy that (presumably second-hand) laptop to prevent it from becoming e-waste. 8GB can be plenty for a student, most don't need much beyond a browser and PowerPoint. Many of my university colleagues were using new $5,000+ MacBook Pros exclusively for Google Docs, that seems more wasteful to me.

[entropie]

8gb ram is not enough for normal browsing if you are forced to use windows 11 which eats easily half of it.

[Mashimo]

> we shouldn’t buy disposable ewaste with a short life.

Indeed. That makes two of us.

[slopinthebag]

MacBooks don't need as much ram - I have an m1 air with 8gb of ram and it's perfectly serviceable, I can even run IntelliJ on it...

[cromka]

I never run out of memory on macoOS on my M1 Air 16GB. Now that I use Asahi on it, I had plenty of OoM crashes.

macOS is really good at memory management, including the compression and offloading to the fast SSD.

[Retr0id]

Do you use Firefox? I have a theory that there's some kind of Firefox-aarch64-linux-specific memory leak but I haven't been able to track it down. I have a 16GB x86-64 Thinkpad and I rarely get OOM issues, whereas my 32GB M1 MBP running Asahi is always on the brink of OOM.

[mixmastamyk]

But is it FF that is taking all the RAM? If you restart it, how long until it fills again?

[mixmastamyk]

You have a buggy program. Zswap has been available for quite a while.

[cromka]

>You have a buggy program.

As in memory leak? No.

> Zswap has been available for quite a while.

Zsawp is not Zram, which is a distant relative of the macOS on-the-fly compression I was talking about. Zram is buggy and still advised against regular use (https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/1i3mdrw/comment..., https://chrisdown.name/2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-...). Zsawp itself is enabled by default in Asahi.

Zram and Zsawp are mutually exclusive on Linux. On macOS, both concepts coexist – except macOS is able to compress individual memory pages (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38300432) on the fly. Zram is a compressed RAM block device with a hard capacity limit.

There is really no comparison here at this point. macOS is vastly superior in that regard.

[mixmastamyk]

zswap works well in my experience. Don't need both. Combined with systemd-oomd I haven't had a swapping or memory issue in many years. 16gb here with VMs and lots going on. This doc clears some things up:

https://chrisdown.name/2026/03/24/zswap-vs-zram-when-to-use-...

[cromka]

> Combined with systemd-oomd

That's my whole point: on Linux a process gets killed to prevent a system lock up if you're about to run out of memory or swap. That never happens on macOS, as long as you have some SSD left, period.

[baq]

I'm yet to see a linux distro with memory configured correctly out of the box. (I haven't looked too hard, but the defaults are abysmal.)

[cromka]

Still can't help the fact memory management on macOS is vastly better with its use of pages compression and unlimited swap.

[mixmastamyk]

Interesting. I'm now working on some admin scripts and will add this to the list.

[mixmastamyk]

Compared to what? Not really true, and hard on the swap drive. Penny-wise meet pound.

[slopinthebag]

Well it's still kicking just fine years later, shrug