Do it. I know which OS will run fine on 8G of RAM and which one won’t.
I wouldn’t be happy with 8 GB of RAM regardless of OS.
Same, I am often about 8 GB of RAM with my daily usage.
Debian keeps barfing on me with 16.
Heh, I have 64 and still can run out. Teams and Outlook for work, one or two java projects in IntelliJ, rust project in Neovim… try to build and run tests with maven and I’m at 70-80% easily. Couple more tabs like discord and I’m out of memory.
I feel that. My new workstation will have 128 GB, I’m very excited about it
What sort of apps are you running?
Mostly Firefox with an admittedly ridiculous number of tabs.
Those are load bearing tabs…
I think my last count hit north of 500 tabs…
I… I may have a bit of a problem…
That’s like an order of magnitude more than me. There’s gotta be something else going on with my system.
Get yourself the ‘auto discard tabs’ extension.
Tbf Firefox seems to have started using much more memory a year or so ago: I could easily hit over 200 tabs, now fifty are a problem. Though it could just be me having switched to the developer edition.
Nor would I, but if apps were actually optimized instead of the Electron nonsense we have now we’d be in a better place. I really hope this forces us to finally build better again instead of relying on infinite resources.
Someone’s smelling the year of the desktop
I built a gaming PC last year with 32gb, and it’s time to upgrade my MacBook…
So, logically, I just moved my workflow to my desktop. I would say dual boot for the win… but honestly most of my games run great on Linux, so I think I’m just good there until and unless this blows over.
When I dual booted it was to try and get away from the win.
Minix and FreeBSD…
/runs; hides
They don’t care, my parents laptop was decently mid-range spec bar storage, manufacturer put in a 5400RPM spinning rust drive. It was damn near unusable, crap from the factory.
Was forced to use it once when visiting and noticed the performance, put an SSD in it and it’s been a fine laptop since. They’re perfectly willing to hobble a laptop to save a buck.
I run fedora on 8GB and find it functional but definitely not comfortable. Anything past a dozen tabs and it starts getting choked up.
Linux adoption… accelerates
No OS if fine with 8GB if you use it for anything other than browsing memes
There’s more than that ?
Actually, the web browser is one of the major offenders when it comes to consuming large amounts of RAM.
In a single tab
You’re thinking of CP/M, right?
Can CP/M address >= 2^32 bytes?
https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/cpm-internals
CP/M requires a minimum of 20K RAM, although realistically, 48K is the bare minimum. Most systems have the maximum 64K.
Sounds like it can’t address > 2¹⁶ bytes.
CP/M-86, maybe.
Hah, guess they’re gonna have to run Linux. Windows 11 would choke on 8 GB RAM.
lmaooooo
It’s the year of the Linux desktop!
I agree, funny enough they require minimum 4 GB, but I had problems with it with 16 GB. 8 GB is nowhere near enough, especially if you use excel, teams, and that crap.
I have to use windows at work, have 32gb and regularly get browser tabs unloaded for low memory. I’m not running VMs or anything. Usually just Firefox, visual studio, and slack.
Personal computer is Linux with 16gb and that’s more than enough.
Same here. Modern 32 gb machine from work is a slog. 2 minutes from wake to actually working, can be 10 seconds just to use the start menu sometimes. Older thinkpad with 16gb and linux/cosmic desktop - wakes almost instantly and perfectly snappy for most things.
I have 64gb 32 for vm and 32 for host, security software eats it all. I pity the poor bastards on the 8gb work laptops. My project is funded separately from all the others so we got to order our own laptops. Our previous laptops sucked at 32gb total.
Most bloated apps like outlook and teams etc regularly use nearly a gig of ram each in my experience. Brutal.
I have single browser tabs that regularly suck down a whole gig. (And they still have input lag).
Ya that depends on the content too and what bullshit they load on the background. In this context, these days I look at tabs as apps lol
an 8gb pc with win11 is today’s equivalent of running vista on 1gb.
So RAM costs them more now, and they need to pass those costs onto customers. However, it seems like they’re also trying to redefine what “mid-range” means to us all, as if we aren’t fully aware of what computers are capable of and what amount of memory is good vs not. Making the various ranges cost more is intuitive. Enshitifying the ranges to sell them at the same price is just antithetical to the whole concept of the ranges…
It’s like if batteries got stupid expensive and they tried to tell us 200km of range is what you get in a touring EV these days. But the distances between all the places haven’t changed…
Can see that happening, in this fake economy.
Isn’t the issue here the newest generation? I keep reading they’re way less tech savvy than the rest of us. Blended in with the propensity for young people to have an iPhone or Android and no PC, well, this junk will likely slide right by.
So our generation will be the first to have to teach both our boomer parents AND our millennial offspring what “RAM” is?!
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻)
GenX is mostly forgotten until tech support is needed, either direction, yes.
Millennials are fine, lol, and overlap with genx, this relates to the teens and early 20s age group.
We had two generations of competent people. It’s a idiot sandwich but the bread is the stupid part!
Maybe this will be a boon. The entire reason the ram requirements got so high as it is is because software optimization was put on the back burner. Maybe a ram shortage where people can’t obtain the ram needed will force the big name software devs to start being more frugal with ram. (talking to you chrome… whom currently is using 2 gigs alone just trying to show a twitch stream…)
Or more realistically be used as an excuse for always online cloud based services a la office 365. “We would let you download the app, but most users don’t have the computing power so instead we’ll just make this a helpful subscription!”
Idk, trying to load up a couple spreadsheets in Edge is going to consume 8gb of Ram in no time.
“Oh don’t worry, you won’t have to actually load spreadsheets anymore, just give our AI full access to your files and it will do whatever you ask :)”
Ideally, you’re correct though and companies start investing in optimization. I don’t see it going that way, but a girl can dream.
Oh fucking hell…
That would still pressure the browser teams to work on memory optimizations.
Honestly, it’ll be more efficient to have memory in a datacenter in that hardware in a datacenter will see higher average capacity utilization, but it’s gonna drive up datacenter prices too.
Not sure I agree. Centralizing storage, and especially memory, creates incredible round trip costs.
I mean, efficient in terms of memory utilization, like. Obviously there are gonna be associated costs and drawbacks with having remote compute.
Just that if the world has only N GB of RAM, you can probably get more out of it on some system running a bunch of containers, where any inactive memory gets used by some other container.
But imagine the latency and network bandwidth issues, there’s a reason most companies moved away from the huge central framework model to distributed computing
As a dirty commie, I agree, but unfortunately under capitalism it is just an avenue for exploitation. Large companies are deciding what we can or cannot have access to and setting the price for it in a manner completely divorced from what they’re offering.
At least one studio, Larian, has confirmed this is the case for them.
When discussing the pressures the company faces when releasing a game in early access, such as audience expectations, Vincke told us, “Interestingly, another [issue Larian is facing] is really the price of RAM and the price of SSDs and f**k, man. It’s like, literally, we’ve never had it like this.”
He continued, “It kind of ruins all of your projections that you had about it because normally, you know the curves, and you can protect the hardware. It’s gonna be an interesting one. It means that most likely, we already need to do a lot of optimization work in early access that we didn’t necessarily want to do at that point in time. So it’s challenging, but it’s video games.”
Good fuck studios just throwing optimization into the bin cause they can. They should fucking actually do some problem solving instead of brute forcing everything.
How do you take that from the comment above?
Not the person you’re responding to, but “most likely, we already need to do a lot of optimization work in early access that we didn’t necessarily want to do at that point” indicates to me that optimization was not a top priority. It’s not unusual for people to optimize after a proof of concept or something, but I imagine in gaming (I don’t do game dev admittedly) you don’t want that too late in the process. If they’re not planning on having it in early access, then their early consistent user base will be more worried about other things. If min spec is 8 then people with 4 won’t get it or won’t complain about poor performance because technically it’s their machine that’s the issue. Lack of complaints about that and feedback about other things further shifts the priority away from optimization. Plus, anyone who’s worked in dev spaces or probably any kind of deliverable knows that there are things that just don’t happen despite your best intentions. Things like optimization are the first to go in the dev space, so by openly admitting to putting it off, it does feel like an admission of “we were probably just not going to get around to it”. In my experience, the further out you plan to optimize, the more man hours you end up wasting, so I don’t see a company investing heavily in that at any point, but doing so post early launch seems wasteful if they legitimately cared about it.
Tried that yesterday, 2.6 GB for just that one tab playing a twitch stream. That’s honestly impressive.
Keeping it positive, nice.
In the world of AI vibe coding, I don’t think so, they will push people even more towards web apps I think
that would require the software companies to actually spend money on competent developers instead of tossing peanuts at prompt writers.
Large computing will exist solely in the cloud where you will pay a subscription for it. Can’t have these grubbing consumers buy anything we elites don’t get a monthly cut of.
I wish this was sarcasm.
I am honestly not sure if that’s a bad thing aside from the capitalism of it all. Almost all tasks normal people do could be done with a 10 year old computer running Linux.
I will find it hilarious if this RAM pricing issue causes people to move to Linux rather than have slow ass Windows 11.
I’m positive its a bad thing. It will mean the end of ownership. Our children will be born and their only worth with be as consumers for which they can crushed for any reason the owners see fit. Its slavery and feudalism nothing more nothing less.
Vasectomy
Sounds like a really good decision for you.
It’s neat that AI is already ruining the world in really tangible ways.
8 GB of RAM would be enough if every fucking application didn’t use Electron.
Or web applications, Firefox/Chrome uses like 32 GB RAM and constantly crashes my computer because of it
Not for me on linux
thank you. came here to say this.
or, well, it also doesn’t play well with ARM, i.e. on macbooks the ram isn’t the bottle neck, its the CPU struggling with electron despite objectively being faster than x86 equivalents.
Soldered in, or upgradeable at least? The former would be a huge reason to never buy the newest gen of laptops.
EDIT: Missed in article, yeah this would suck if they stick to soldered RAM for ultra-thins.
Another problem manufacturers face is with notebooks that ship with soldered DRAM. In particular, ultrathin designs would need to be revamped to modify their configurations.
Those soldered low RAM ones are going to be in the dump a lot sooner.
They do not care about the planned obsolescence of it all.
They absolutely do care. It’s a bonus for them.
Easier to justify making trash.
Excellent. Hopefully some of them will have hardware that supports #openBSD that I can pick up for pennies on the dollar. I believe the #thinkpad x1 carbon is already on soldered RAM. I can see many in the #Linux crowd stand to profit handsomely from this, given their much more broad hardware support 😜
Cheap homelab.
Literally manufactured for the garbage dump.
lmao of course it’s gonna be soldered in to push you to higher tiers
Probably single channel too because of course
I speak on behalf of all IT Support personnel everywhere when I say “fuck you”
“WHY IS IT SO SLOW?!?!?!”
Let’s see how this plays out with windows 11 😄
Swap is a thing. It’ll kinda suck, but not as much as it would have pre-nvme. Except that now there’s an nvme shortage… and an SSD shortage.
Ugh, I guess I’ll just put Windows 2000/ME on there to complete the retro look.
Windows 2000/ME
One is good, but slower, the other is more buggy than 98SE, but a bit faster. Not much in common between them other than year.
I don’t think that the NVMe shortage is that big of a deal in terms of using it for swap. It’s much cheaper than DRAM per GB. You don’t need that much.
You could technically boot it… Not for long, and don’t open anything, but still counts, right?
concidering they were shipping windows 11 systems on 4 gigs of ram and selling it, I expect it won’t change much. They worked like shit but they still sold. You make it cheap enough people will buy it regardless of flaws or speed.
Often the people that buy those tiers of computers don’t know enough about memory to know how limited they’d be.
Time to switch to Linux people lol. Windows is barely usable on 8GB these days.
And set up ZRAM.
What’s ZRAM?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram
One of the mechanisms for compressing memory in Linux. Trades CPU time for effectively having more RAM Recent versions of Fedora apparently have it on by default.
I’ve read that zswap, another mechanism, is preferable on newer systems with NVMe/SSD, where paging isn’t as painful; that only compresses pages going to swap, but requires that you actually have some swap. I haven’t used either.
Probably someone should try benchmarking them for various workloads if systems are going to be running on much less memory for a while. Was more of an edge case thing that not many people cared about, but if operating with less memory is suddenly more important, might have broader interest.
On Linux, also possible to opt for lighter-on-memory versions of a lot of software that you’re kinda committing to using the Microsoft-provided version of on Windows. File browser, compositor, etc.
Most everything on the desktop is going to be light on ram except the web browser and electron apps (i.e. web browsers). Games use a lot too, but thats less of an issue because you don’t tend to multitask as much with games. Using onetab or some other way of limiting browser tabs severely helpa a lot.
ZRAM is real. Even on computers with lots of ram it lets the os compress and tuck away memory that a process is hoarding. When I start using android studio all these long-running election process get 1/2 their memory swapped out to disk, and evidently they never really needed it because days later I still see lots of their memory swapped out.
better start removing AI from Windows then… holy fucj my 16gb is barely holding up with windows11 that in forced to use on my work PC. slow as BALLS, it’s just raping the entire system performance constantly
I wonder what’s going to happen to the electron frontends if machines are bottlenecked by ram so bad. Wasn’t facebook just planning to switch whatsapp’s frontend to webview as well? And win11’s desktop is electron too. Everyone was acting like ram is unlimited.
Don’t worry, you’ll just need to subscribe to My Windows Copilot Cloud+ to get access to a virtual PC with plenty of RAM from anywhere! It’ll be powerful enough you’ll barely notice us logging all your actions and blocking anything we don’t like.
I have win11 on a work surface laptop pro with 16gb and I’m consistently at 15+GB used. This is corporate bloat. How do I know? I have a personal surface pro 6 with win11 and 16gb and it runs like a breeze.
Corporate bloat is such bullshit.
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Security is all theatre. When NIST says make secure passwords and never change them but your fortune 500 infosec policy tells you to rotate your password every 30 days?
LOL
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Does NIST actually said that? Secure pwd+no change it?
Yes. Pwd change should only be on evidence of compromise assuming you have made a secure password.
tbf a lot of that crap is mandated by insurance compliance requirements
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no, but it isn’t necessarily the fault of whom you might think it is that there needs to be 2 or 3 other ram hogs installed
Company computers often come with pre-installed spyware which is notoriously RAM hungry. My company laptop immediately after boot uses nearly a full 16gb before you open any programs. Luckily our IT department realizes this and only allows us to purchase machines with 32GB and up. They’re probably not happy with the current prices, but being a F500 company they can afford it…
…do we really need to use the word “raping” to talk about PC performance or can we agree that there are a hundred other words that fit better in that spot?
EDIT: Wooo free downvotes. Y’all are a bunch of snowflakes. I tried to make a point on behalf of others, since there are people who have traumatic lived experience with the concept of “rape” and would probably prefer not to be reminded of it. Nobody serious about computing is going to go out and say “this process is raping the performance” because it’s just not a good idea. I bet you (if in tech field) wouldn’t say it in front of your boss. But sure, call me sensitive and pull out a semantic argument.
I can smell you through your screen. Go take a shower and try being human.
sometimes facing fears is a better way to overcome problems. hiding or making everyone avoid things that bother you or were a traumatic experience doesn’t help anyone.
I used this word because it’s definition applys to the scenario. It’s the act of pilaging and plundering of my system resources by microsoft and other monitoring tools with no recourse but to abandon them. rape is a perfectly fine word to use. if it was strictly limited to sexual acts, I wouldn’t have used it.
edit: I use this word at work too and have no issues with it both verbally and written. moreso verbally because people can’t apply multi definitions of words and always assume 1 main definition
you’re limiting your interpretation of rape to a single definition. there are multiple, and this certainly fits as one
I know it’s hard, but you’ll get through this. One day at a time, step by step, things will get easier. Some days it might not feel like you’re making any progress; Some days you’ll feel like you’re moving backwards. But time heals all wounds. You’ve got this, eventually you won’t even remember their comment existed. Stay. Strong. Keep fighting.
Hah. I never even said the comment hurt me.
I’m just speaking on behalf of those who have been hurt. If you can’t recognize why someone might do that, you’re either a rape apologist or you’re an incel troll. Probably both.
Its going to be okay. We all run from our feelings sometimes.
Does midrange being at 8GB mean that entry level will be 4GB? because I know corpos are gonna be corpos.
(I don’t think windows even run at 4GB lmfao)
Edit: Also, this RAM shortage might force people to use Linux 😁
Windows 11 can run on 4GB. That’s the minimum for the listed requirements, and the other day, I saw Best Buy selling a 4GB model, and I see some systems for sale online. I would imagine that it’s not ideal.
I have seen a few of them. Yes they are bad. Basically idles at 85% memory usage on the desktop with nothing open.
Windows going Vista again
Windows 11 for me boots using around 7GB. Open a heavy browser tab or two and you’re page thrashing next. I can’t use a computer like that.
Even on an 8gb or 16gb system Windows uses over 4gb on a fresh boot. At 4gb it’s going to be swapping to fish non-stop. The disk will be thrashed and be dead in a year of use.
If I recall that 4GB min on win11 is explictedly with no applications. Including browsers.
It’s only the os.
Windows 11 can run on 4GB
That ‘can’ does a hell of a lot of heavy lifting. But then again, it says Windows can run in 4GB, it doesn’t say anything about your apps.
Seems to me like there will be a split. A lot of critical thinkers that are frugal will move to Linux and up its market-share, but there will also be a lot of deals that companies make with cloud computing platforms as well for their employees instead of purchasing new laptops (which will probably also allow them to cut back on their IT staff).
Those that are still lost when it comes to tech from 20 years ago will also buy into cloud compute platforms just because they use it at work and can’t be arsed to learn something slightly different.
I wonder how long it will take before people realize it’s cheaper to own your own hardware than lease compute time from a cloud provider? I’ve seen this same cycle with cloud VMs, I expect this will be no different.
They won’t, ever. Not the general public, at least. Most are still perfectly content and onboard with paying for 10 different streaming services for music/movies/TV. Only immediate numbers mean anything, and $5/mo is better than $10 once, simply because 10 is larger than 5. Plus, look at all this extra shit I didn’t want that is included!
With cloud computing you get someone (or at least some entity) to blame when things go wrong which apparently has some value too. Also, if you don’t need a lot of resources cloud can be cheaper than setting up whole infrastructure by yourself, but that has a ton of variables. Plus with cloud there’s often option for colocation/high availability/ddos protection and other stuff around which can be pretty expensive to build yourself.
Obviously if you try to shoehorn your current modrate sized esx/hyper-v/whatever environment to the cloud as is, that’s going to be expensive.
Obviously if you try to shoehorn your current modrate sized esx/hyper-v/whatever environment to the cloud as is, that’s going to be expensive.
Yeah, my experience has been in the MSP space for small to medium companies. We’ve had tons of customers forego upgrading local hardware to go to a cloud provider, then have to do it in reverse a few years later when they realize they’ve already paid out the cost of their hardware and licensing agreement in hosting costs, and still have to keep paying to run the same systems.
Yeah, this could spell the end for local installs of Microsoft office. Gdocs and o365 for everyone. Not sure if thats a win or loss.
I see it wholly as a loss, because it advances the idea of subscriptions for anything and everything, and Microsoft will be right there on the front lines taking advantage of the new revenue stream (so losing local installs won’t hurt them at all and is what they’re going for).
Im really surprised Microsoft hasn’t already come out with a chrome-os like neutered version of windows specifically for this.
They did for education purposes.
‘entry level’ specs have been 4gb ram for over a decade, and they’re still selling shit-tier laptops with only that today.
8 GIGABYTES!!? How am I supposed to load a mouse driver in THAT!?
You don’t need to load the mouse driver on your laptop. We have a subscription service for it!
GeForce now
Cool! Is the scroll wheel split into up and down services?
5 cents per scroll. Because pennies are over.
Seems reasonable. Can I buy left and right click separately as monthly subscriptions?
Boy was I wrong about modern computing, it’s all so powerful and useful!
We’ll trim it down so the mouse driver only has a little AI.
You can have a little AI, as a treat
laughs in MS-DOS
This wouldn’t be much of an issue if most of the laptops nowadays didn’t come with soldered in ram and no options of expanding.
Exactly. Give me two slots and I don’t care if the base model comes with 64kb, that problem will be fixed before I even switch the thing on for the first time.
I boycott those.
So it remains shit quality even if RAM gets more affordable at some reasonable point in the future.
Apparently there are m.2 NVMe drives with DRAM caches.
I don’t know if anyone makes a pure DRAM NVMe drive — it’d forget its contents every boot — but if so, on Linux, you could make the block device a swap partition.
