I had a similar experience trying to use an old laptop with 2GB of RAM. I was surprised how much it struggled with basic tasks. I remember my first computer with 32MB of RAM. Obviously we live in a different world now but still, it's not like I was trying to do anything more ambitious than what I used to do on that PC.
It is wild how bad things have gotten. I have a small Linux tablet with 8GB of RAM that I only really use for browsing. Even that runs out of RAM quickly when I open more than 20 tabs (depends on the sites of course). And more than 3 Electron apps pretty much always means game over.
15 years ago 8 gigabytes of RAM were "wow what am I going to do with all this space" territory.
Its a pathetic world.. and sad.. I have currently 2 browsers open and my memory commit is 370MB.. If I hear that Win11 uses 3GB of RAM idling, I really get shivers... WTF?! How is that even possible? Bloat is astronomical and yet.. Most people just does NOT care...
> I have currently 2 browsers open and my memory commit is 370MB..
In what context?
>If I hear that Win11 uses 3GB of RAM idling
Modern Gnome and KDE distros with batteries included also idea at around 2GB RAM which is a useless metric anyway as Windows 11 also preloads frequently used takes and apps on boot.
Less than that, between 900MB and 1.2GB and that's due to file and stuff indexation. The good thing on Linux and BSDs is you can swap for a light wm/compositor and your back below 150MB idle.
I recently installed Arch Linux on a fairly old (but not ancient) Intel T2 Mac, with the GNOME DE, and it uses less than 1.5GB of RAM. I went for the standard gnome package which as far as I can tell is "batteries included."
That leaves about 6.5GB for programs, which I think is acceptable.
> Modern Gnome and KDE distros with batteries included also idea at around 2GB RAM
Really? I'm seeing 1.3 for Mint/Cinnamon.
See my comment above.