I guess RAM is a bell curve now.
I actually audibly laughed when Raspberry Pi came out with an 8GB version because for anyone who thinks 4GB isn't enough probably won't be happy with 8 either.
I wonder what the hell they are doing with it? I mean I have the 3B with IIRC 1GB and I can use the desktop and run python scripts to fiddle with all the I/O ports and stuff, what do you do with a raspberry that needs eight times the RAM??
I'm seriously curious!
I have experienced this myself.
My main machine at home - a M2 Pro MacBook with 32GB RAM - effortlessly runs whatever I throw at it. It completes heavy tasks in reasonable time such as Xcode builds and running local LLMs.
Work issued machine - an Intel MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM - struggles with Firefox and Slack. However, development takes place on a remote server via terminal, so I do not notice anything beyond the input latency.
A secondary machine at home - an HP 15 laptop from 2013 with an A8 APU and 8GB RAM (4GB OOTB) - feels sluggish at times with Linux Mint, but suffices for the occasional task of checking emails and web browsing by family.
A journaling and writing machine - a ThinkPad T43 from 2005 maxed out with 2GB RAM and Pentium M - runs Emacs snappily on FreeBSD.
There are a few older machines with acceptable usability that don't get taken out much, except for the infrequent bout of vintage gaming
The fact that electron both exists and is one of the most popular cross-platform development frameworks tells you everything you need to know about the current potato'd state of software development.
You know, I've always loved C and doing my own memory management. I love learning optimization techniques and applying them.
But you know what? Everybody around me keeps saying I'm being silly. They keep telling me I won't find any jobs like that. They say I should just swallow my juvenile preferences and go with what's popular, chasing trends for the entire rest of my career.
I don't think you can blame people for trending away from quality software. Its clearly against the grain.
You know, I’ve always loved C and doing my own memory management. I love learning optimization techniques and applying them.
That's awesome, and honestly who knows what you'll come up with if you're given time to follow your passion there. Decades ago SCM was done through CVS and SVN and other pieces of garbage until Linus came out with Git which a main reason that it is so good IMO is its speed. Google Chrome arrived on the scene in a lot of the same way (of course now it's as bloated a cow as any other browser, but at the time it was faster than anything available).
I don’t think you can blame people for trending away from quality software. Its clearly against the grain.
No definitely not. Electron is basically a creation of idiot middle management who insist that the web app and the app app be the same exact thing and be developed by the same group of understaffed, underpaid, underappreciated developers. So they worked out a framework to make it so they could change something in one place and have it reflected everywhere.
But it's still as potato as it gets.
The underlying issue is that nobody wants to develop using any of the available cross-platform toolkits that you can compile into native binaries without an entire browser attached. You could use Qt or GTK to build a cross-platform application. But if you use Electron, you can just run the same application on the browser AND as a standalone application.
Me? I'm considering developing my next application in Qt out of all things because it does actually have web support via WASM and I want to learn C++ and gain some Qt experience. Good idea? Probably not.
It's like so many programmers never evolve past the "playing around with web dev stuff" days. The fact that JavaScript is one of the most used languages is appalling.
The whole 1+1 = 11 meme made me laugh and then avoid JavaScript whenever possible, but I wonder if many others saw it and thought, "now I've gained more experience in JavaScript!"
I will also never understand how JavaScript development has gotten so complicated with seemingly zero benefits. It takes minutes to do a "frontend build" and the output grows larger all of the time. I bumped into some Angular crap that was hundreds of megabytes somehow, and still AJAX fetched the same info 4x on page load because the "MVCC" or whatever it's called didn't even buy them the abstraction of using the same values multiple times on one page...
Yeah it's ridiculous with every small app needing to be packaged with a full DOM and maybe even an http server for all I know and what should have been a few kb ends up being 1000x that or more.
I hate electron apps. Just make a website asshole, don't bundle a whole chrome browser! The only one I'll tolerate is ferdium, because having a message control center is kinda neat.
I want normal applications, that run on my computer I have at home!
hank hill jpeg meme.jpg
Also, massive security surfaces.
Any music producer is familiar with 3rd party license managers like ilok that make you use their Shit-ass electron application that gets an update once every few years.
Started learning flutter a week ago, hopefully it pays off and I get a good job :)
Have you even used Linux? 16GB of RAM is enough, even with electron apps
Not in my experience. The electron spotify app + electron discord app + games was too much. Replacing electron with dedicated FF instances worked tho.
About 6 months ago I upgraded my desktop from 16 to 48 gigs cause there were a few times I felt like I needed a bigger tmpfs.
Anyway, the other day I set up a simulation of this cluster I'm configuring, just kept piling up virtual machines without looking cause I knew I had all the ram I could need for them. Eventually I got curious and checked my usage, I had just only reached 16 gigs.
I think basically the only time I use more that the 16 gigs I had is when I fire up my GPU passthrough windows VM that I use for games, which isn't your typical usage.
We used to say 4GB is enough. And before that, a couple hundred MB. I'm staying ahead from now on, so I threw in 64GB. That oughtta last me for another 3/4 of a decade. I'm tired of doing the upgrade race for 30 years and want to be set for a while.
I can literally trace my current Ryzen PC's lineage like the ship of Theseus to an Athlon system I built in 2002. A replacement GPU here. Replacement mobo there. CPU here, etc.
Idk, I never managed to use above 5GB without launching a game.
8 GB is fine for basic tasks and it won't change anytime soon.
4GB even.
I have no idea how people use so much RAM. I use a 16 GB machine for work and it runs perfectly. For the majority of the time I'm well below 8GB. And I do use Electron apps.
Of course, I'm aware of the possible uses demanding more than 16 GB but I can't believe this would be the case for a majority of the people.
The people who installed toolbars until half their screen was full are still around. Just now they keep 100 tabs open instead
I remember all the windows users saying 16gb of ram is enough
Apple: Enough!
But you'll have to buy a whole new laptop when it turns out that was a lie.
This is currently me with modded Kerbal Space Program and Cities: Skylines lol
16 was enough. A decade ago.
16 is still enough for me? I currently play RDR2 on high settings and QHD on arch linux and I always have minimum of 3 GB to spare
Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping
2TB NVME dedicated entirely to virtual memory
I think someone needs to update that old "if programming languages were weapons". JavaScript is a cursed hammer.
8GB is enough for me, but my laptop usually only has GNOME, Orca, and Cinny running.
16gb and a number less than 16gb both not being big enough numbers is making me crack up
I only run out of ram (16GB) when I'm playing minecraft with 280 mods
The only time I can remember 16 GB not being sufficient for me is when I tried to run an LLM that required a tad more than 11 GB and I had just under 11 GB of memory available due to the other applications that were running.
I guess my usage is relatively lightweight. A browser with a maximum of about 100 open tabs, a terminal, a couple of other applications (some of them electron based) and sometimes a VM that I allocate maybe 4 GB to or something. And the occasional Age of Empires II DE, which even runs fine on my other laptop from 2016 with 16 GB of RAM in it. I still ordered 32 GB so I can play around with local LLMs a bit more.
At least 8 is better than 4
I retired my 4gb/120gb/celeron ThinkPad 11e today, since I've got a more powerful laptop lying around and I've used it for 8 years nonstop. It used to freeze up occasionally when there were more than 4 Firefox tabs open, and not to mention, my obsession with GNOME causing a shortage of system resources.
Man that ThinkPad felt like family, I'm gonna miss using it.
I use Arch btw
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