I ran with 8gb ram for 7 years because zram would shove my swap into what little ram I had available and it actually worked well enough that I didn't feel like upgrading until this year lol.
For me it's a pattern of "Ctrl+t" to open a new tab and then I search "my interesting query". After that, I use "shift+tab" or "Ctrl+shift+tab" to navigate between tabs. Rinse and repeat until I get tired.
I don't like searching in my current tab because I don't want to lose the info I have.
Oh, here's the 4 pages of documentation of items and crafting recipes of this nodded game I'm playing that are open at all times.
Then there's the tsb with the video series I'm watching, the tab with the dropout home, other two tabs for two series I'd like to watch, about 3 different tabs that I just closed down that were opened yesterday to search some ffxiv market item prices for a friend, WhatsApp web, some Path of exile trade live tabs in case an item I've been searching for a month shows up on trade in a reasonable price to pick up the game again, the medianxl ladder to check for gear on too players, 2-3 tabs for players on the ladder to check their gears as a rough template,...
I'd say at any given time it's a minimum of 10, and I'm not being held responsible of my work browser tabs. That's more like, 4 github repos because they ask me about stuff and I forget to close them, hue, the spark docs on like 5 tabs, 3 google searches, several excels with project tracking stuff, and maybe an extra 10 to 20 tabs open depending of what I'm searching or have been asked about in the last 2 days.
"Simple Tab Groups" extension for Firefox desktop allowed me to evolve from constantly rearranging/bookmarking ~20 shrinking tabs in a window and dropping projects; to hoarding 30-40 tabs worth of research material and unfinished project ideas in rotating groups
"Free" memory is actually usually used for cache. So instead of waiting to get data from the disk, the system can just read it directly from RAM after the first access. The more RAM you have, the more free space you'll have to use for cache. My machine often has over 20GB of RAM used as cache. You can see this with free -m. IIRC both Gnome and KDE's system managers also show that now.
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.
I got 32 just so I could hoard more browser tabs. I have a more minimal setup on my laptop that goes with me places and any tabs I anticipate not needing for a couple weeks or more go to the desktop with more ram.
The other day I got a Mini PC to use as a home server (including as media server with Kodi).
It has 8GB of RAM, came with some Windows (10 or 11), didn't even try it and wiped it out, put Lubunto on it and a bunch of services along with Kodi.
Even though it's running X in order to have Kodi there and Firefox is open and everything, it's using slightly over 2GB of RAM.
I keep wanting to upgrade it to 16 GB, because, you know, I just like mucking about with hardware and there's the whole new toy feeling, but I look at the memory usage and just can't bring myself around to do it just for fun, as it would be a completelly useless upgrade and not even bright eyed uuh, shinny me can convince adult me to waste 60 bucks on something so utterly completelly useless.
I wish. I use vscode which sucks up most of my resources (basically a terribly inefficient IDE running on elotron...). 32gb and it still not enough to run my dev environment decently.
The reason vscode is so popular is because it is far more efficient than the electron app it's based on. Atom was slow and the worst resource hog I've ever seen.
The plugin ecosystem and great built-in support for the most popular languages keep it popular.
VS Code wasn't based on Atom. It was written from scratch. The system architecture is very different.
VS Code uses Electron, but all the heavy stuff is running in separate threads or processes, which is why it feels faster than some other Electron apps.
Unfortunately, many Electron apps break the #1 rule of desktop app development: Never do any heavy processing on the UI thread. Any Electron app that does heavy-ish processing really needs to use node:worker_threads or something similar, plus a UI library like React that can prioritise handling of user actions over rendering other parts of the UI.
Hate to type this but mate, skill issue. If its taking that much memory check your addons because you fucked up somewhere. I use it with several debugging and linting addons and it runs on a virtual remote desktop where I'm lucky if I have 4GB to share between vscode and the browser with 20 tabs open.
Maybe your issue is thst you ran heavy programs through the vscode console and those registered in the task manager as vscode? Idk, but either way, skill issue :P
Do not underestimate the ram needed just by the lsp. I switch from vscode to nvim, and for some project 8gb is not enough due to that : that part of the memory consumption is sadly not editor-dependant :/
I use neovim (btw) and have it kitted out like a full IDE and it uses about 1gb of RAM at most to run a project. Crazy how much RAM static analysis takes.
Current 4 year old laptop with 128GB of ECC RAM is wonderful and is used all the time with simulations, LLMs, ML modelling, and the real heavy lifter, Google Chrome.
Most modern laptops can do 64 gb of ddr4. It's expensive but doable. Like most U series CPUs are limited at 64 gb. Something with a xeon mobile chip will probably see a lot more.
yeah, i was just pointing out that we've seen desktop chips in laptops before, it's not common, but it has happened, and will likely continue to happen.
Dell 7740 Workstation laptop. Has a Xeon processor and a 16GB Quadro video card as well. 5 M2 slots so I currently have 36TB of SSD as well. 4k screen, physical privacy shutter camera, actual buttons for the trackpad. I love this thing.
The cat is the Rimworld mod with a hefty memory leak yesterday. 32 GB was full in seconds. But it gave me enough time to find the culprit and kill Rimworld without trashing my session every time.
