I just took a Core i5, 6 GB RAM laptop from 2011 and reinstalled Linux Mint and put in a 1 TB SSD. The difference between that and Ubuntu 23.10 and a 750 GB 5400 RPM drive was like night and day.
I feel like recently developed games and apps expect the user to have a "moden" sized RAM, meaning that the decs don't give a crap about optimizing RAM-usage.
In a similar fashion I got my sons old netbook. It has 32GB flash as storage medium. 27GB were in use by Windows, Office, and Firefox. User file size was neglectable. Then it ran into problems because it wanted to download an 8GB update.
Now it runs Kubuntu, which uses about 4GB with LibreOffice and a load of other things.
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.
Transcoding an HDR blueray to h265 filled it up pretty quick and I'm about to start dabbling with game development/3d modeling.
I've also filled it up pretty quick learning how fast various data structures are in which situations. You don't really see a difference in speed until you get into the billions of items at least for python.
For automations and small apps it's fast enough. It's a fair traidoff for the fast turnaround time.
I'm thinking of learning go or c though because i don't care much for the runtime errors. It's no fun using an application for a while just for a typo in a rarely used function to tank the entire app.
It's great that the system is so efficient. But things do come up. I once worked with an LSP server that was so hungry that I had to upgrade from 32 to 64gb to stop the OOM crashes. (Tbf I only ran out of memory when running the LSP server and compiler at the same time - but hey, I have work to do!) But now since I'm working in a different area I'm just way over-RAMed.
That that to the 3000 browser tabs I have open, two instances of VS code, the multithreaded python app I’m running and developing, the several-gigabytes large dataset that’s active in memory.
