

I got a free, going to be recycled, dell with 8gb of ram from work. I threw in an nvme and installed Linux. It’s not the lightest Linux install, but it is Arch, so definitely on the lighter side. I idle at under 1gb and under normal use don’t break 2. I do some coding which uses more but nothing super crazy. MacOS probably uses a little more ram, but it’s not Windows. I’d wager than the vast majority of people don’t come close to using all of that RAM, and power users are going to get hardware for the task, and this isn’t it.

I did just check and I was wrong. I idle at 1.6GB. I may have been thinking of a single app I had open when I looked the other day. I did just open Firefox and it took about a gig. Opening about 20 tabs and navigating to different sites did Bum it up to about 5gb. So yea, 8 is on the lower end, but it’s usable and I’d bet most people would be fine. Throw in things like swap and high speed storage, I feel most people wouldn’t notice. Definitely not enough for high usage though.
I miss when 4gb was good enough.