It really depends on what you are doing with your system...
On my main PC I want the full Linux Desktop experience, including some Gnome tools that require webkit - and since I am running Gentoo, installing/updating webkit takes a lot of RAM - I would recommend 32 GiB at least.
My laptop on the other hand is an MNT Reform, powered by a Banana Pi CM4 with merely 4 GiB of memory. There I am putting in some effort to keep the system lightweight, and that seems to work well for me up to now. As long as I can avoid installing webkit or compiling the Rust compiler from source, I am perfectly happy with 4 GiB. So happy actually, that I currently don't feel the need to upgrade the Reform to the newly released RK3588 processor module, despite it being a lot faster and it having 32 GiB of memory.
Oh, and last, but not least, my work PC... I'm doing Unreal game development at work, and there the 64 GiB main memory and 8 GiB VRAM I have are the absolute bare minimum. If it were an option, I would prefer to have 128 GiB of RAM, and 16 GiB of VRAM, to prevent swapping and to prevent spilling of VRAM into main memory...
About 10 years ago I was like "FINE, clearly 512MB of memory isn't enough to avoid swapping hell, I'll get 1 GB of extra memory." ...and that was that!
These days I'm like "4 GB on a single board computer? Oh that's fine. You may need that much to run a browser. And who's going to run a browser regularly on a SBC? ...oh I've done it a lot of times and it's... fine."
The thing I learned is that you can run a whole bunch of SHIT HOT server software on a system with less than a gigabyte of memory. The moment you run a web browser? FUCK ALL THAT.
And that's basically what I found out long ago. I had a laptop that had like 32 megs of memory. Could be a perfectly productive person with that. Emacs. Darcs. SSH over a weird USB Wi-Fi dongle. But running a web browser? Can't do Firefox. Opera kinda worked. Wouldn't work nowadays, no. But Emacs probably still would.
It really depends on the quality of software you are running? A SMTP, IMAP, Mumble, Photoprism, Jellyfin, bittorrent, Tor, Subsonic compatible server, who even remembers what else? Fine. One small Minecraft world? Boom you're dead.
I genuinely don't know how people are having their web browser use so much ram. How many tabs do you have open? Even at work where I run a commercial loan origination system and our core customer system in a web browser, at most I'll have 15-20 tabs open. I don't know how people are having dozens and dozens of tabs open that they're using 64 gb of RAM.
In my case, along with using my laptop as a regular PC, I also use this as my work computer. I contract for multiple companies and each window has tabs for each web software for every company, organized by consolidated tabs. So Google analytics, Crazyegg, tableau, and docs, calendar, etc. I also do web testing and each tab has tests.
I find that Edge does a better job at memory management so it's now my primary and I test on Chrome.
When in doubt, blame zoom. The sheer amount of completely different outlandish weird bugs and glitches as well as the fact that they were told what the correct API for screen sharing on Linux is just for them to completely ignore that and do something weird, specific, niche and bad instead … I've never seen something like that since like Windows xp.
I'm completely convinced they have absolutely no idea what they're doing on the frontend (app and web) and just have the latest newbie hire hack things together until it kinda works on their machine.
I use both Fedora (daily driver) and Windows 11 Pro (gaming), and Windows doesn't use much more RAM honestly. Fedora uses currently 10.5 GB of RAM with Firefox, Spotify, Plex, and Telegram running (looks like a couple of YouTube tabs in Firefox are having a party here with 1 GB of used RAM for three tabs...), and Windows is typically only 1-2 GB above this with the same type of usage. I have never maxed out my 32 GB of RAM on either OSs.
You have a lot of ram, linux will try to use most of it, it's a normal thing. There's a huge difference from using a large amount of ram when available to NEEDING that amount to run.Try installing both OSes on a machine with 4gb, and see the difference between them. One will be usable, while the other will have a poor performance. You can even push it harder with a 1gb machine. Linux will provide a system with basic functionality, while windows will be unusable.
I have the same setup - Fedora daily driver and Windows 11 Pro. I recently switched from Windows daily driver and it's crazy how much better my laptop runs with Fedora. Processor temp and RAM usage are both less than half of what they were on Windows.
