this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
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I can't speak for Macs. But in the Linux world, 8GB is fine. In Windows it's awful because of all that bloat. I'm guessing Macs fair better for OS efficiency.
Macs don't have copilot so that's like 4GB saved right there
Can it be debloated? I might do that for my parents home PC.
Idk about copilot, this is my recommended debloat tool
Ha ha ha. True!
The only time I ever use more than 8gb on my M4 Mac Mini is when I run a Win 11 VM through Parallels
So I presume you're saying that the entire system shouldn't slow down when Firefox starts swapping?
8GB of ram on Macs is fine for work and medium photo/video editing, as long as you have plenty of SSD space and don’t use Apple Intelligence.
People forget that MacOS is UNIX at its core.
I'm running Mint on an 8BG laptop and I'm surprised by just how much can be running at one time. Right now I'm running Firefox with 10 open tabs, Waterfox with 8 tabs, Thunderbird, Keepass, Calibre, Signal, a Whatsapp client, Syncthing, Libreoffice Writer with 2 open docs & Calc with 2 open small spreadsheets, a couple of terminals and Gedit, and didn't even notice it until came across these comments. A friend who uses Windows 11 says 32GB is recommended now.
Microsoft must be thrilled with age verification being required at the OS level. What a great way to lock people into their Microslop garbage.
Oh......I guess I'm the only one who opens firefox, and literally thousands of tabs.
One day I closed one window and it said "Are you sure you want to close 158 tabs?"
I said yes. It was one window. I had 23 more windows.
When I have too many tabs, I press that blue button of the "one tab" extension.
I rarely have more than 10 tabs open on my phone, and rarely more than 5 in my PC. How do people have so many tabs?
Literally thousands? Have you tried bookmarking things after they've sat unused for awhile?
I typically just periodically save my browser windows with a tab manager extension. I just say because thousands sounds like way too much to keep track of...
When I get to 20 or so I have to start closing some tabs to keep track of things. How do you find the tab you're looking for when you have that many open?
Even without any extensions, there is a shortcut in Firefox to search and switch to a tab by typing % on the address bar
Tab search.
Tab groups.
Color coding.
I use sideberry addon on Firefox and workspaces in Vivaldi.
I’m running Arch on a Macbook Air with 2GB of RAM. Its limited, but it does what I want it to.
Many entry level MacBooks of the last decade have probably been 8 GB. I have a M1 MacBook Air and that is 8 GB. It is fine for me.