this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
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I have macbook air with M1 chip, I wish I could change to linux but unfortunately I cant so I try to stick as much as possible to using open source on macos. But i cant understand why FOSS apps take up so much space in memory. I'm even getting messages that says that I dont have space left in memory and i must close apps, and I thought that chip M1 was enough with 8gb of ram. I send a pic of my memory usage.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (2 children)

16GB should be the absolute bare minimum with 32GB being standard at this point.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Selling 8GB high end laptops like macbooks with soldered RAM shouldn't be a thing at all. It's such a waste of resources, because devices which could be used in 10 years won't be useful beyond basic word processing and browsing.

The only reason Apple has them is to have a low starting price while taking 200 USD for 8GB additional RAM. For context, 16GB RAM costs about 50 USD in retail.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

won’t be useful beyond basic word processing and browsing.

Not even that. For most basic users, web browsing is by far the most resource-intensive thing they'll ever do, and it'll only get moreso. If it weren't for modern web design, most users could honestly probably be okay with 4GB or 8GB of RAM today. For a laugh, I tried using a 512MB Raspberry Pi 1B for all my work for a few days. I could do absolutely everything (mostly developing code and editing office documents) without any problems at all except I couldn't open a single modern web page and was limited to the "retro" web. One web page used up more resources than all of my work combined. I'm guessing it won't be too many years before web design has evolved to the point where basic webpages will require several GB of RAM per tab.

(I agree with your overall point, by the way. Soldering in 8GB of RAM these days is criminal just based on its effects on the environment)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I think we should strive for either:

  • Not building/using piece of shit platforms MacOS that is very wasteful when it comes to memory management.
  • Not building/using piece of shit applications like electron-based stuff or the window server from this post.

There is no reason why 8gbs shouldn't be enough, excluding gaming.