Wow! I'm surprised that everyone is so surprised. Windows resource requirements - especially the RAM - have always grown exponentially between major versions. Remember that we started with some 16MB RAM. They have consistently demanded hardware that completely obsoletes the hardware in the market that can run the previous generation of Windows.
Windows is the best example of a software that always manages to completely nullify or even negate the Moore's law.
Unfortunately they don't ship to norway (or have a norwegian layout available). But would really like one if/when they do. Not in a rush to get a new laptop now though. I'll keep framework in mind when its time for a new one.
This goes two ways, everyone with less ram will probably don't know about Linux and just lose their laptop (not upgradable ones) and: new built laptops will have more ram and better CPUs. And guessing with the windows handheld industry this also boosts them. But it's gonna be a big shame people just abandoning their tech because of not enough knowledge.
This is like people abandoning a stick shift and rigid frames/chasses for modern automatic/CVT and and unibody with crumple zones. The latter are complicated, expensive, and inefficient - but substantially more forgiving to the average driver who merely wants to get from A to B with the minimum amount of effort. Linux will be there for people who choose to dedicate hundreds of hours a year to the hobby of computers. For everyone else who doesn't want to open their laptop to replace the keyboard, update their wireless card, and clean or replace the system fans and solder in a new power connector, buying a new laptop with the extra horsepower (to overcome the code creep) will offer them all those things at a price cheaper than even taking them to the corner repair shop to get the mechanical failures fixed.
That's a bit hyperbolic. You're talking as if it's still early 2000s. Many Linux distributions have very good user experience for beginners and better out-of-the-box device driver support than even Windows.
I choose one of those niche distributions since I have advanced requirements. But I have observed a steady decline in hardware-related issues over the years. In fact, Linus Torvalds confirms this in an interview.
Linux distributions are a viable alternative to Windows these days. But what keeps people away from it is misinformation and FUD like these.
Many Linux distributions have very good user experience for beginners
I 100% agree. The issue isn't beginners, it's people who already know windows, and only windows. They'd be just as lost switching to OSX. Kids pick up chromebooks easily, but most adults - the ones who have 5-8 year old machines with only 8GB - are completely lost. I tried to get my mother onto LibreOffice (okay, Open Office...it's been that long) and it lasted less than a week and one panicked old-lady newsletter deadline. She was utterly lost, and no amount of help would get her out. To be fair, she gets lost when her phone updates to the newest major OS revision.
I choose one of those niche distributions since I have advanced requirements.
I chose windows for the same reason - specialized industry where nearly all tools are written for Windows. I have $15k in software, $200k in setup and procedures, and $100-200k in training I would have to redo to switch to linux, and while that was happening I would have zero income, so double those numbers for net losses. That's assuming I could even find perfect analogs in the linux world, which is unlikely, and that I was willing to receive and send non-standard files to all of my colleagues. I could consider Wine/Proton, but then I'd have to learn it or risk losing $2000/day plus the cost of tracking down repairs if anything (like an update) broke a critical piece of software. It simply not worth the financial risk.
The article mentions AI. 16gigs feels far too little to run a LLM of respectable size so I wonder what exactly this means? Feels like no one is gonna be happy about a 16gig LLM (high RAM usage and bad AI features)
Plausibily, they could be trying to dictate the minimum standard for budget laptops, win11 doesn't really need a TPM, it's in the minimum spec so that every laptop is forced to have one.
I may have 128Gb in my current rig (Dell Precision T7610), but if this is the way you’re gonna be bloating Windows 12, imma gonna be running to OpenSUSE or some BSD.
Yes, I use Win10Privacy to lobotomize all of the spyware and cruftware that comes with Windows. But it’s gotta be re-run after every significant Windows update.
I have 32 gigs of ram and this shit is going to make me switch to Linux as well.
I do not want an OS that demands half of my processing power just to run in the background. I see absolutely no reason for an OS to demand 2-4 gigs of ram, let alone up to 16
My new PC has 64g ram. But I'm also not using or plan to use windows. Checkmate M$!
But in all seriousness, 8g is like, the foundational minimum these days. Sad tbh. Browsers are so bloated these days. I'm surprised that browsers haven't become their own OS yet. It kinda feels that way in some environments.
All this will do is push standard users into more expensive machines. Which, well, yeah, that's the point.
I mean, 16GB? Is anyone who's aware of RAM needs on a workstation accepting that in the first place? I'd love to run a poll and see who's running less than 32. 16 was luxurious 15 years ago.
I take it you don’t know much about enterprise IT. I guarantee most businesses are running 8-16GB as standard. Where I live an 8GB laptop costs $1400, the equivalent with 16GB costs $1900. And to get 32GB you’re looking at an additional $1600.
Just saying, but... Lenovo ThinkPad E15 gen4, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, for 500€ on last year's Amazon's Black Friday... plus 70€ for an additional 32GB RAM stick.
Anyone at "enterprise IT" spending an additional $1600 for 32GB, which takes a whole 10 minutes to install, should be kicked out.
Yes but of course no one wants a clunky-ass 2kg ThinkPad with a 1080p screen. They want a Yoga or Surface Pro. I would like to see you install additional anything in one of those!
An E15 in my country costs $1200 with 8GB soldered-on RAM. Not sure if it has a second memory slot, although I would assume so. But the screen is crap and they weigh twice as much.
Also - who is buying enterprise equipment from Amazon?
They may want whatever, they'll get what the IT dept gives them based on requirements... 👀
Anyway, an E15 is 1.8Kg, while a Yoga Pro is over 2Kg. The screen is not the best, but perfectly fine for anything other than photo/video work. It does have a SODIMM slot in addition to the soldered RAM, a secondary M.2 2280 slot, and the main NVMe is also an M.2 2242 (right now, the 8GB one goes up to 40GB RAM + 2TB + 16TB NVMe). Only thing it's missing, is a WWAN slot.
Honestly, the Yoga have better screens, some are smaller and lighter, some have a touchscreen or pen support, or an SD reader... but all similar raw performance, and less upgradeability. The Surface Pro, I've heard horror tales about, both from a lack of upgradeability, and difficulty to repair.
who is buying enterprise equipment from Amazon?
Someone who wants it at half price, and yet with full warranty 😉
I'm still running 16GB. I built my PC in 2015 and it's been my gaming/work/dev machine ever since. Have only upgraded GPU and storage.
It is definitely showing its age, but I don't need to worry about the Windows requirements. My CPU isn't supported for Windows 11 so I'm sticking with what I've got until Windows 10 hits EoL. Then I'll probably buy a 64GB AMD system and switch to Mint at that point.
Meanwhile, chrome and desktop apps (Electron-based) like Slack, note apps, etc, takes 1GB just to open... Well, tbh I don't know if they really use physical RAM space, but anyway.
On modern OSs, files get mapped into RAM, which is a fancy way of saying "it can stay on disk, but it can also be cached in RAM, but the unmodified parts can get discarded out of cache at any moment, and any changes go first to RAM, then get written to disk at some later time".
The apps also use buffers to hold data, and one of the largest buffers is for the canvas or window display buffer. These have to use actual RAM while the app is running; you can only swap them out to swap/pagefile if you suspend the app... which is doable, but rarely done... otherwise they'll get swapped back in, the moment the app needs them (which usually is all the time... but some buffers might stay mostly swapped out some of the time).
There is also RAM compression going on (at least on Windows), that can keep mostly empty and/or rarely used buffers all the time "in RAM", but taking just a fraction of the space.
I love to bash MS, but this feels like an industry-wide trend to /never/ care about optimizing beyond the bar of "typical specs of new devices in rich countries". I'm guessing it's just to limit labor costs, and computers are less-rapidly-improving than the 90s/00s?
Browser canvas is one of the worst culprits: it has to keep a buffer with an uncompressed bitmap several screens in size.
Old browsers used to keep a single screen worth of canvas buffer, then redraw stuff as you scrolled... which made it a horrible experience. You can still find some of that with "clever" web designs where they replace fonts or move things dynamically as you scroll.
Then you have websites with "infinite scroll" that just keep increasing the canvas buffer size more and more and more, to infinity and beyond... and people wonder why their Facebook or Reddit tabs use so much RAM.
@Fizz true. My PC came with 4 GB originally. It was a pain once I opened the browser or Discord (which I usually do). Upgraded to 12 and no longer have any issue, at least on the current distro.
It already should have that. 8 GB is the absolute bare fucking minimum for most computers these days, but unless you have 16, it's a generally unpleasant experience.
My memory idles on around 3341MiB with a browser and just a few basic daemons like Syncthing used in mint cinnamaon. 4GB is pretty tight unless you are willing to make some behavioural changes or use a less friendly distro. But 8GB is more than enough.
Different story trying to run VMs on my server, though.
While 8GB is typically enough for Linux today, it may not be enough a few years from now. Buying a laptop with 8GB of soldered in RAM would limit the useful life of it.
It will probably depend on distro. Some distros might get more bloated, but I think most won't do anything that makes them unusable on lower-spec hardware, especially those that specifically have low system requirements as one of their core tenets.
That would depend largely on the use-case and specific software. I'm fairly confident that Lyx isn't going to become bloated any time soon, but I can see that happening especially with proprietary alternatives like Word (ignoring for a moment Word isn't on Linux). It all really depends on whether or not a less bloated alternative exists.
Everything seems to get more bloated over time. An 8GB system probably won't become unusable soon, but things will certainly begin to run less smoothly to the point that many people would replace the computer. Browsers and electron apps are RAM hogs.
It depends on the use case, but for what it's worth on a 4GB Android tablet, I can run VSCode + Chromium/Firefox via Termux without too much trouble. ~2GB of memory is taken by Android, so 8GB on a proper Linux system is more like 3x more memory available. It would take a massive amount of bloat to make an impact. My main concern would like with websites being wasteful with both memory and CPU usage via JS, rather than the browser itself becoming bloated.
I have 8 and am able to play 4x games at high settings w/o significant lag until late game lol. People really tend to blow this one out of proportion. Unless you're an incredibly heavy user you probably don't need more than 8 and 16 still feels luxurious.
"Incredibly heavy user" here, my Windows 11 boots into 9GB thanks to a few tools and a LibreOffice preloader... then gets close to 16GB the moment I start a few VMs and some dev containers in VSCode.
Fortunately, when I got this laptop on a -50% sale with just 8GB, I made sure that I'd be able to add a 32GB memory stick... so now it keeps running with up to 20GB of cache, and it flies.
I browse the internet on a phone or a tablet... don't really get people who use a laptop just for that. Running some office software, is the minimum I see as the need for a laptop, when it isn't drawing, 2D or 3D design, audio/video, or something programming related. Maybe gaming, but there seem to be better options for that too (either a desktop, a Steam Deck, a console, or a phone/tablet again).
8 GB is the absolute bare fucking minimum for most computers these days
I keep seeing this statement all around the web but it is still amazing that we need that much RAM even for today.
Don't get me wrong, I know 8 GB is becoming the standard even for mobile phones, so it is only logical to assume to bump this number for PCs (why no 12 GBS of RAM? IDK) and I have been using 16 GBs of RAM for 10 years now, it is a MacBook Pro and for me Apple does not make it clear to see how much of that RAM I'm actually using... Regardless RAM has never been a problem for me, with casual usage, and I always thought 8 GBs should work the same for even a lighter usage, why do I say that? Because before moving to such a Mac I used a laptop with 4 GBs of RAM around 2011-2014 and it was a pain in the ass to use (the processor was shit as well) for simple navigation for my thesis... So yeah if you think 8 GBs is bad, try 4 GBs.
Another reason I think 8 GBs is "a high amount for casual usage" is that my work PC had also 4 GBs of RAM, but there was not a reason to hoard tabs and such, so it was very manageable (also the processor wasn't shit, but it was like a Core i5 or something like that, the usual office PCs you see and know), if we are talking about bottlenecks it would be the shitty HDD speeds LMAO.
What I think you guys all mean with 8 GBs of RAM is the bare minimum for nowadays standard is if you use it for IT related topics or you like to hoard stuff in it (which ain't bad, unused RAM is wasted RAM after all) or simply depend on heavy programs which ain't the web browser, for casuals I'd say 6 GBs would be a fair number, although it is not usual, and fuck 4 GBs of RAM in 2024, for any kind of device lol (I bet offices still use that dog shit).
Anyway I'd personally aim for 16 GBs of RAM or more regardless, for any of my future purchases, because I like to keep my stuff for years to come.
I am on the poorer side and living in one of the central European countries (yeah I'm a teen)
I only have a core 2 duo desktop with 3 GB of ram and a laptop with a i5 also with 3gb of ram, both only HDD machines
The desktop now runs Linux, but because it has components even Intel doesn't want to list on their website (the mobo) it runs it pretty poorly (also I bricked it somehow not run windows or any other usb install media, which is a big problem), the laptop runs windows 7 (it literally refuses to open the update utility I downloaded from MS's website, so that's that, two obsolete machines, that are absolutely horrendous to do anything with (not to mention my shitty 350$ phone is more powerful than both of them combined)
Because computing architecture is based around powers of 2, and having memory that follows that pattern is more efficient.
What I think you guys all mean with 8 GBs of RAM is the bare minimum for nowadays standard is if you use it for IT related topics or you like to hoard stuff in it (which ain’t bad, unused RAM is wasted RAM after all) or simply depend on heavy programs which ain’t the web browser,
I would disagree. Even casual usage these days is much more demanding than it once was. Try having Chrome, Spotify, and Discord open all at once. You're going to start pushing that 8 GB further than you'd imagine. Plus, look at the new apple silicon macbooks. They put 8 GB in as the baseline saying shit like "since we designed it to all work together, it's more efficient", and real world test have shown that to be complete nonsense.
4 GB is completely unacceptable for deskop/laptop usage and would be a miserable, if not nearly unusable experience.
16 GB right now is definitely the baseline any new machine should have. I have a MacBook Pro from 2015 that has 16 GB and it still feels reasonably comfortable to use.
I do agree with your central premise here that it's absurd that we need so much. But it's just what happens as hardware advances, software developers push the limits of what the hardware can handle. Either that, or they're just lazy and don't bother optimizing since they think the machine can handle it (looking at you Chrome devs, and anyone who uses Electron).
Because computing architecture is based around powers of 2, and having memory that follows that pattern is more efficient.
But what about Android phones? I see there are not many issues on that side with that amount.
Try having Chrome, Spotify, and Discord open all at once. You're going to start pushing that 8 GB further than you'd imagine.
Yeah, I see a pattern here, all of that is Chrome lol.
My former work PC (which I mentioned before) that had 4 GBs of RAM required to be running always Windows 11 with Chrome, Microsoft Dynamics, Outlook, Microsoft Word, Excel, Sumatra PDF and some other few apps, so yeah I agree it was miserable, but I remember I could have Spotify as well, and AFAIK there are still Chromebooks shipped with 4 GBs of RAM? Granted they are more alike to a phone than a PC.
(looking at you Chrome devs, and anyone who uses Electron).
Definitely, my girlfriend uses a lot Notion on my Mac, and while the RAM isn't an issue there we can see the fans spinning non stop when it is in use lol, I told her to open it on a Firefox tab and it was much much quieter.
My Win10 PC with just my default apps open, which is mainly Firefox, Steam, a few other Launchers, Obsidian and Messaging clients - 8GB definitly doesn't cut it today anymore. Running a newer game smashes the 16GB border easily. https://files.catbox.moe/lh6zwa.png
