yeah, i have 32gb and it still feels excessive. even with plex, firefox, steam and discord going i'm only at 8 gigs of usage. all i do on my desktop is game though, i have a server for virtualization and stuff.
The server this Lemmy instance is on was bought in August 2024 with 512G ram. I bought another 8x 64G in April 2025 for £610. That is ~£75 a stick of 64G server ram.
I just bought another server to go along side this and was originally planning to buy the same RAM again. It is now £500 per stick. So I've had to instead donate the extra RAM I bought last year to the new ram-less server.
So that's £75 -> £500. Absolutely ridiculous. Would have cost me £8000 in RAM when the rest of the server was ~£2k.
Indeed. Dude my main pc is just a modest last gen r7 32G with decent gpu. And I'm glad I pulled the trigger for the 16g upgrade last year.
Now I don't personally believe in higher being, but I'll be lying if I'm not nervous everytime I power up the thing. If anything breaks even if I go a tier cheaper I couldn't afford the replacement.
I bought 48 GB DDR5 for my laptop back in September, just before the prices ignited their rocket engines. I paid 120€ I think. Prices now are like 500(ish). Truly insane.
I got a laptop back in late July for moving abroad. Figured I might as well go big or go home while I had the money and set myself up with 96gb ddr5, the max the laptop can hold. "I might get a desktop later and this way I could take half out of the laptop and use a converter to put it in there".
It was about $250 for me after tax to get that much ram. Hard for me to find prices on my exact ones but looks like about $900-1200 currently before tax and where I'm at now it would be a 25% vat
Wish I had gone with the upgrade I planned to do last fall.
I was considering splashing out a bit for some ram upgrades to my laptop from 2018. It's got 8 gig now, but can support 32. Or maybe just one 16gb stick to start slow, it's got overheating issues.
I was watching videos from a IT tech about how he gets performance/cooling upgrades from just replacing thermal paste/putty on chips. Oh, I didn't know about putty on non CPU chips, I guess I'll get some of the right thickess from a store near me. Oh no, looks like that's out of stock. Well, I want to replace everything at once.
Oh here's another place that sells putty, let me get that while I have some time off. Do they have ram too? Oh no, they don't that's ok. I can wait, and get it for myself as a treat for achieving some behavioural goals I have for myself.
After all, why not? It's late October 2025 , I have plenty of time to buy ram whenever I want to.
Late October 2025
Plenty of time to buy ram
October 2025
RAM
I kept spending my money on food instead of upgrades. Here's hoping DDR5 drops below 2x its Sept 2025 value in 2027, to coincide with Zen 6.
I tried to get RAM on eBay. 8GB & 16GB kits are not even being auctioned, and when they are sold their price tag is well over 3x their value, often 4x (GB£170). 32GB sells for 3-4x its value (£260-£320), almost as much as 64GB, which is often going for >2.5x (~£380-£440). If you're desperate or are okay with massive financial waste, eBay is often the cheapest place for 64GB kits, but anything lower is relatively more expensive than just buying from distributors
I had been considering getting a decent computer since 2017 iirc. And since then, prices were already rising constantly, no crypto, plandemic, LLMs or fearmongering needed. So my suggestion is, get the upgrade as soon as possible despite the prices, for the "now" seems to always be the cheapest.
That was a more lengthy read than I expected, but rightfully so.
Thanks for the link, long due read why Brave's stunts are constantly ringing alarm bells.
Unfortunately I can't run windows 7 in a docker container for the lickable aero theme and nostalgia. The KDE aero themes just don't feel the same either. Lots of subtle things missing.
Meanwhile, the latest macOS update took away 20% of my battery life and added 15% of ram usage, just because, while the battery life of my Linux laptop is actually getting better with updates.
Nope. Running a windows guest for legacy development (50GB for few bigger visual studio projects and other related apps) then Rider, Android Studio, IntelliJ, podman and other apps native on Linux, often switching between them. 128GB is a bit much even for this, but it is never bad to have same free space just in case. The only downside is that I bought 4 DDR5 modules only to later find out that they put a break on speed as AMD really prefers 2 of them.
50 GB in memory for a visual studio/programming project being a bigger project seems like rather an understatement, unless you're working on machine learning, simulations, or something of that nature.
Now launch one (1) web browser and watch an elephant drop on your sofa.
The OS is no longer relevant to memory usage, really, not in the way it used to be. The amount of memory required for a usable desktop is peanuts compared to the amount required to run a few web-apps.
My guess is that 90% of the growth in browser bloat is to support bloated websites.
These days websites can be games, drawing applications, video players, etc. As a result, browsers have basically become operating systems. In addition, the browsers try to support even the most horribly written websites, but that means more bloat in the browser. Meanwhile faster computers mean that people developing websites are just doing more and more javascript, more and more animation, more and more mouse tracking, etc.
If you have an old device with an old browser, a lot of modern websites are completely unusable. I have an old iPad that's too old to update, and it's not actually possible to use browse Github anymore. It just ends up with javascript elements on the page that never finish loading. And Github isn't some site thrown together by someone vibe-coding their first website or something.
Honestly, the whole model of "you can customize every detail of your page (and not the user) but you also have to implement basic accessibility and consider screen resolution/orientation, reduced-motion, prefers-color-scheme, etc., etc.), for each and every single webpage, is imho inherently broken.
The sad thing is, they could in most things (except reduced/animations) just not do that and the browser does accessibility & stuff for you and you have a lightweight site. But that's not how businesses (and developer curiosity) work. Also, progressive enhancement instead of graceful degradation most don't do.
Btw, to the Indieweb: you don't have to define a text or background color: browser does that already. And you have to care for prefers-color-scheme now. Please keep CSS to layouting.
unless you're using older, more limited hardware in which case you kinda need the OS to not use a shitton of resources so you can actually run programs that do.
i never upgraded the RAM in my thinkpad X230T past 4 GB because on linux with TDE i genuinely don't need to. i can open multiple instances of waterfox and vivaldi and do a digital painting in krita all at the same time without having to worry about OOM at all.
the difference is night and day compared to trying to do the same on windows or even linux with a heavyweight DE, under which i can maybe get a few tabs open in a single browser before it just freezes.
And don't you dare compile kotlin and run on emulator while you use Chrome to read stack overflow. Those 128Gb ram from that guy are going to be short.
My unpopular opinion: free ram is useless ram. Go on, OS. Put evertyhing into ram. I have 64GB of it. Fill it the fuck up. I want to be able to open things blazingly fast, that's why its there. The trick is leaving enough so new things can fit without waiting for cleanup. And windows isn't bad at scaling its usage. Afaik, wIndows installation on 8GB will use less than the same installation when 16GB is available.
If you had unlimited ram, you'd be mad the OS was wasting time cleaning up behind itself.
It's not unpopular but only half right. Free RAM already gets used for caching, invisible to you. What you see in the task manager is reserved RAM and that one can't be used by other applications. If all RAM is reserved, you get pagination or the OOMkiller.
Haven't had memory issues on my Windows 11 laptop so I don't check how much is free. On the other hand, free disk space is jumping between 0 and 10 GB without notification as to what appears or disappears. This is annoyingly unreliable because the space often gets closer to 0 right at the time when I need to Syncthing files with others.
My wife's laptop has always had those lovely features with Win10. She'll be doing normal Word stuff, some browser tabs open, and suddenly Windows decides to do something in the background, fans kick on high, even her mouse becomes sluggish. I had hoped that moving her to an SSD and 64GB(!) of memory would remove any of that, but nope, just Windows being Windows. Meanwhile, I have btop open all the time on my Linux machine, and my memory and CPU are always where I'd expect them to be (except for Snap stuff, I need to do a bit of extraction there for the rest of my normal apps).
Sounds like Windows Search Indexer. I just changed the settings in my Win 11 VM to only index the Start menu, but I'm also an old school folder user, so I never use the Windows menu to find files anyway.
Before the change, my VM was arbitrarily locking up, unable to do just about anything. It's been a lot smoother since the change.
I do. Games like KSP, Rimworld, that like modding, can get heavy quickly. Can we please move to a patcher approach, instead of keeping all the modified assets (and the originals) in the RAM all the time?
I cried today b/c although I knew my mistake, I accidentally sat upon my balls just as I was sitting down to sort through my missteps & reinstall w/ a refreshed and more educated approach.
Karma was doing its thing with me today. I hope that I am paying it forward because I can’t honestly think of any hurt I may have caused to warrant such a thing upon me.
Now, I don’t know why I’m crying.
Probably seen enough trailers for that new E.T. Movie w/ Jared Goff.
My linux system uses that 32 gigs. If it sees 32gb available it will use 30 for caching but its not the same as windows where its using 10gb because the apps actually need it to run
Dude's filthy rich. Wish I had gone with the upgrade I planned to do last fall.
Back in 2021 I accidentally bought a 64 GB kit rather than the 32 GB one I intended to. No regrets now but really felt like an excess back then.
Ah the times when you could accidentally buy twice as much RAM.
64 still feels like excess on a Linux machine... But I got mine back in like 2023-2024 so I got lucky
It really depends on what you do.
Once you start opening programs your OS is basically negligible.
Sure windows might use 5 gigs of ram on startup. But when you’ve got 100 tabs open using 20 gigs of ram the 3 vs 5 gigs is a drop in the bucket.
If you do virtualization it stacks
Came here to say this. I almost never run just 1 computer on my computer.
Base Linux OS + Test/burner VM + Work VM --> want 64 GB
or
Base Linux OS + Whonix Gateway + Whonix Workstation --> want 64 GB
Well, when you're coming from 8gb, that 5 gigs is a big deal. I went overkill with 64, but I'm not going to complain about it.
This is why I have learned to immediately max out the RAM on the motherboard for my wife when I replace her machine.
Some of these webpages are absolutely stupid in how much they load. She likes to have 40 or 50 tabs open all the time.
Her current desktop has 64gb
yeah, i have 32gb and it still feels excessive. even with plex, firefox, steam and discord going i'm only at 8 gigs of usage. all i do on my desktop is game though, i have a server for virtualization and stuff.
holy crap tell me about it.
The server this Lemmy instance is on was bought in August 2024 with 512G ram. I bought another 8x 64G in April 2025 for £610. That is ~£75 a stick of 64G server ram.
I just bought another server to go along side this and was originally planning to buy the same RAM again. It is now £500 per stick. So I've had to instead donate the extra RAM I bought last year to the new ram-less server.
So that's £75 -> £500. Absolutely ridiculous. Would have cost me £8000 in RAM when the rest of the server was ~£2k.
God damn
Indeed. Dude my main pc is just a modest last gen r7 32G with decent gpu. And I'm glad I pulled the trigger for the 16g upgrade last year.
Now I don't personally believe in higher being, but I'll be lying if I'm not nervous everytime I power up the thing. If anything breaks even if I go a tier cheaper I couldn't afford the replacement.
I bought 48 GB DDR5 for my laptop back in September, just before the prices ignited their rocket engines. I paid 120€ I think. Prices now are like 500(ish). Truly insane.
I got a laptop back in late July for moving abroad. Figured I might as well go big or go home while I had the money and set myself up with 96gb ddr5, the max the laptop can hold. "I might get a desktop later and this way I could take half out of the laptop and use a converter to put it in there".
It was about $250 for me after tax to get that much ram. Hard for me to find prices on my exact ones but looks like about $900-1200 currently before tax and where I'm at now it would be a 25% vat
I was considering splashing out a bit for some ram upgrades to my laptop from 2018. It's got 8 gig now, but can support 32. Or maybe just one 16gb stick to start slow, it's got overheating issues.
I was watching videos from a IT tech about how he gets performance/cooling upgrades from just replacing thermal paste/putty on chips. Oh, I didn't know about putty on non CPU chips, I guess I'll get some of the right thickess from a store near me. Oh no, looks like that's out of stock. Well, I want to replace everything at once.
Oh here's another place that sells putty, let me get that while I have some time off. Do they have ram too? Oh no, they don't that's ok. I can wait, and get it for myself as a treat for achieving some behavioural goals I have for myself.
After all, why not? It's late October 2025 , I have plenty of time to buy ram whenever I want to.
Fuckig fUCK FUCKFNGUFKC
A Laptop from 2018 has an older DDR version, than the current ones. So less affected by high RAM prices as current ones.
It's still anywhere between 50% to 150% more expensive.
I kept spending my money on food instead of upgrades. Here's hoping DDR5 drops below 2x its Sept 2025 value in 2027, to coincide with Zen 6.
I tried to get RAM on eBay. 8GB & 16GB kits are not even being auctioned, and when they are sold their price tag is well over 3x their value, often 4x (
GB£170). 32GB sells for 3-4x its value (£260-£320), almost as much as 64GB, which is often going for >2.5x (~£380-£440). If you're desperate or are okay with massive financial waste, eBay is often the cheapest place for 64GB kits, but anything lower is relatively more expensive than just buying from distributorsI had been considering getting a decent computer since 2017 iirc. And since then, prices were already rising constantly, no crypto, plandemic, LLMs or fearmongering needed. So my suggestion is, get the upgrade as soon as possible despite the prices, for the "now" seems to always be the cheapest.
Got a brand spanking new laptop with great specs last fall. Oh boy, am I so glad I did.
I got my 32gb DDR5 6000 ram for 90 bucks on sale on 2024 Black Friday
Now add a German Shepherd labelled "Firefox" 😝
Firefox is very heavy, I'm enjoying using its friends Brave or Falkon
"Friends"
That was a more lengthy read than I expected, but rightfully so. Thanks for the link, long due read why Brave's stunts are constantly ringing alarm bells.
both chromium based :(
konqueror/khtml is the real alternative
My browser tab collection doesn't help.
all that ram is for my many virtual machines i planned to run and never did because i didn't actually get any practical use out of them
Containerize everything
Unfortunately I can't run windows 7 in a docker container for the lickable aero theme and nostalgia. The KDE aero themes just don't feel the same either. Lots of subtle things missing.
Actually...
https://github.com/dockur/windows
holy shit
wait a minute this docker container is just running qemu and a web-based vnc client >:/
Have you tried aerothemeplasma?
There's still time.
elon musk inherited an emerald minefrom his father, but your child will inherit 32 full gigabytes of ram
Bold of u to assume any of us can afford kids in the first place lol. Well, at least if u wanna raise them properly.
Then 24 gigs*
Meanwhile, the latest macOS update took away 20% of my battery life and added 15% of ram usage, just because, while the battery life of my Linux laptop is actually getting better with updates.
amen brother
I see what you did there.
Laughs in one year old 128GB RAM on fedora Linux.
Running AI locally?
Nope. Running a windows guest for legacy development (50GB for few bigger visual studio projects and other related apps) then Rider, Android Studio, IntelliJ, podman and other apps native on Linux, often switching between them. 128GB is a bit much even for this, but it is never bad to have same free space just in case. The only downside is that I bought 4 DDR5 modules only to later find out that they put a break on speed as AMD really prefers 2 of them.
50 GB in memory for a visual studio/programming project being a bigger project seems like rather an understatement, unless you're working on machine learning, simulations, or something of that nature.
That's a bit small... for disk space 😂😂😂😂😂
You can actually do a lot of stuff with this and no disk at all , just having a 500MB NFS over nas or some 2010 old laptop 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
dump a pregant cow next to the kitten labeled "Chromium"
yeah. I want to think Firefox is a bit better 😅
Don't forget to allocate the rest to Firefox, and your swap as well since that's still not enough
Now launch one (1) web browser and watch an elephant drop on your sofa.
The OS is no longer relevant to memory usage, really, not in the way it used to be. The amount of memory required for a usable desktop is peanuts compared to the amount required to run a few web-apps.
One of the many reasons why we need a new and better browser without all the bloat.
That's half the problem, the sites are the other.
And the third half is bad math
My guess is that 90% of the growth in browser bloat is to support bloated websites.
These days websites can be games, drawing applications, video players, etc. As a result, browsers have basically become operating systems. In addition, the browsers try to support even the most horribly written websites, but that means more bloat in the browser. Meanwhile faster computers mean that people developing websites are just doing more and more javascript, more and more animation, more and more mouse tracking, etc.
If you have an old device with an old browser, a lot of modern websites are completely unusable. I have an old iPad that's too old to update, and it's not actually possible to use browse Github anymore. It just ends up with javascript elements on the page that never finish loading. And Github isn't some site thrown together by someone vibe-coding their first website or something.
Honestly, the whole model of "you can customize every detail of your page (and not the user) but you also have to implement basic accessibility and consider screen resolution/orientation, reduced-motion, prefers-color-scheme, etc., etc.), for each and every single webpage, is imho inherently broken.
The sad thing is, they could in most things (except reduced/animations) just not do that and the browser does accessibility & stuff for you and you have a lightweight site. But that's not how businesses (and developer curiosity) work. Also, progressive enhancement instead of graceful degradation most don't do.
Btw, to the Indieweb: you don't have to define a text or background color: browser does that already. And you have to care for prefers-color-scheme now. Please keep CSS to layouting.
I am skeptical that the browser is the problem.
Well, no, but the amount of browser-based apps due to their convinience in development is stupid.
Yes
unless you're using older, more limited hardware in which case you kinda need the OS to not use a shitton of resources so you can actually run programs that do.
i never upgraded the RAM in my thinkpad X230T past 4 GB because on linux with TDE i genuinely don't need to. i can open multiple instances of waterfox and vivaldi and do a digital painting in krita all at the same time without having to worry about OOM at all.
the difference is night and day compared to trying to do the same on windows or even linux with a heavyweight DE, under which i can maybe get a few tabs open in a single browser before it just freezes.
I see you don't run electron app in flatpaks :)
The rest of the couch is my podman services
as everything should be
just wait until you need to edit some xml in android studio
And don't you dare compile kotlin and run on emulator while you use Chrome to read stack overflow. Those 128Gb ram from that guy are going to be short.
what is?
Right, short-circuited Android Studio with Atom, my bad.
Same reason as everyone else who waited to upgrade.
Me with ZFS root:
D:
And here I am with a budget 12 GB RAM phone, that will turn out to be flagship tier due to the RAM crisis. Holy fuck.
We were so spoiled, we didn't even know what we had.
You can still use Chrome in Linux (my wife uses them together on her laptop).
32 gigs is quite a bit of a show off in these trying times...
I bought 2x32 ddr4 6months ago for $160. It's worth about twice that now! I have half a mind to resell it 😭
The way it should be. If it were Windows you'd have a massive bloated fat cat that can't breathe taking up almost the entire sofa.
It would make Garfield look like an Olympic cathlete in compurrison.
Tbh if you run qbittorrent you can manually give it as much as you got in the settings.
learned that the swap -> oom way with deluge. It would go overboard if not contained.
My unpopular opinion: free ram is useless ram. Go on, OS. Put evertyhing into ram. I have 64GB of it. Fill it the fuck up. I want to be able to open things blazingly fast, that's why its there. The trick is leaving enough so new things can fit without waiting for cleanup. And windows isn't bad at scaling its usage. Afaik, wIndows installation on 8GB will use less than the same installation when 16GB is available.
If you had unlimited ram, you'd be mad the OS was wasting time cleaning up behind itself.
It's not unpopular but only half right. Free RAM already gets used for caching, invisible to you. What you see in the task manager is reserved RAM and that one can't be used by other applications. If all RAM is reserved, you get pagination or the OOMkiller.
The problem is when one of my two RAM sticks is dedicated to exclusively the microslop spyware and my games can barely run on the leftovers.
I'm playing modded Skyrim with windows, when i used to get crashes the log report almost always have the RAM usage on critical.
When installed some new mods on Linux and they start to crash i was getting "All Good" status on every single log
haha. I have 32GB of RAM in my server, and even though I run a LOT of stuff, it rarely gets past 6 or 7GB used
IntelliJ has entered the chat.
Haven't had memory issues on my Windows 11 laptop so I don't check how much is free. On the other hand, free disk space is jumping between 0 and 10 GB without notification as to what appears or disappears. This is annoyingly unreliable because the space often gets closer to 0 right at the time when I need to Syncthing files with others.
Possibly windows update/defender downloading>installing>deleting files. Might also be the page file, though that doesn't usually shrink that often
My wife's laptop has always had those lovely features with Win10. She'll be doing normal Word stuff, some browser tabs open, and suddenly Windows decides to do something in the background, fans kick on high, even her mouse becomes sluggish. I had hoped that moving her to an SSD and 64GB(!) of memory would remove any of that, but nope, just Windows being Windows. Meanwhile, I have btop open all the time on my Linux machine, and my memory and CPU are always where I'd expect them to be (except for Snap stuff, I need to do a bit of extraction there for the rest of my normal apps).
snap sucks, don't use it, use flatpak
Sounds like Windows Search Indexer. I just changed the settings in my Win 11 VM to only index the Start menu, but I'm also an old school folder user, so I never use the Windows menu to find files anyway.
Before the change, my VM was arbitrarily locking up, unable to do just about anything. It's been a lot smoother since the change.
I have 32 gigs and Windows 10 doesn't actually use too much RAM. Around 4 GB, but still quite a lot. Still nothing to how much free RAM I have though.
if the cat was a windows 11 system he'd be so big he consumed the entire couch
Between Firefox being its usual self and the 11.5gb of VRAM and GTT kwin_wayland is currently using, 32gb does not feel excessive.
because of this I use x11, i3wm and brave
I'm going to stack as many Arch VMs as I can inside each other, on top of my btw existing Arch.
Matryoshka Arch
(I'll just wait a few days until the new Arch iso drops and becomes stable enough)
(Edit: not babushka)
Matryoshka*
Whoops. Thanks!
Watch them disappear once you start a blender render
I have 32gb of ram on my desktop and genuenly im not sure if ive ever used more than 24gb of ram
i have 64, not sure if i've used more than 12
To be fair the one time I did manage to push 24gb it was a stress test, outside normal workflow tho I generally dont use more than 8gb of ram
I do. Games like KSP, Rimworld, that like modding, can get heavy quickly. Can we please move to a patcher approach, instead of keeping all the modified assets (and the originals) in the RAM all the time?
I cried today b/c although I knew my mistake, I accidentally sat upon my balls just as I was sitting down to sort through my missteps & reinstall w/ a refreshed and more educated approach. Karma was doing its thing with me today. I hope that I am paying it forward because I can’t honestly think of any hurt I may have caused to warrant such a thing upon me. Now, I don’t know why I’m crying. Probably seen enough trailers for that new E.T. Movie w/ Jared Goff.
Sitting on a cool 64, over here.
Relatable
i like linux because it's pretty lightweight and good for older hardware
My linux system uses that 32 gigs. If it sees 32gb available it will use 30 for caching but its not the same as windows where its using 10gb because the apps actually need it to run
I beg your pardon, sir
You'll be forgiven
Meanwhile Windows is in the background like I’ll just take the rest, thanks. 😭
All I have is 8 gigs right now, 1 channel dead. My windows hovers are 5 gig ram to just run. Hurts.
Jeez. Have you tried debloating Windows?
Lemme tell you, my friend said he'd help me install Linux but we been dragging our feet.
We're not lol, why do you think the users of other OSs envy you? It's not hard to switch.
Now add the whale named "Brave Browser"
use falkon browser