this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2025
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16 is minimum and 32 is recommended if you do much pc gaming, browsing, or torrenting. Things with multiple programs. A single browser and steam open. I regularly hit 16 to 20gb on mint and librewolf. I rarely never see a use past 32gb. I find that to be the sweet spot right now. Anything higher than 32 is better spent on ddr5 upgrade. Caveat being if you run some serious programs but that's overly rare even by today's software.
I have 8GB in my laptop running mint, its used for browsing, office work, 3D print slicing, and occasionally I torrent a file from it...it is absolutely no issue whatsoever and it never even breaks 4GB use unless it's actively slicing a 3D model. 16GB minimum I can agree with for gaming, but for desktop use as mentioned above you can easily get by with less.
Sure, as long as you're willing to deal with the performance hit of constantly swapping to disk.
Even SSD drives are a magnitude slower that any modern RAM stick, so you're adding TONS of processing time by running that little memory. And gods help you if your swap is on spinning rust....
If that was the case I wouldn't have 4GB of idle ram just sitting in my PC. There is no unloading to swap when 50% of available ram is unused.
you did notice the person you are replying to is using linux, right?
they are correct, 16gb goes a loooooong way in linux. I know begause I too have 16 on my work and gaming rig and ram has never been a bottleneck
your comments sound like typical windows experience
Because windows caches aggressively.