The extra space is for two Electron apps of your choice.

Just install Chrome or Firefox. Problem solved.

You've clearly never lived with a cat. Your metaphor is crushed by the Kitty Expansion Theory: No piece of furniture is large enough for a cat and any other additional being.

The other 28GB is for running chrome

Just like the human eye can only register 60fps and no more, your computer can only register 4gb of RAM and no more. Anything more than that is just marketing.

Fucking /S since you clowns can't tell.

Op doesn't run applications, just an os...

My 2010 arm board with 256MB ram running openmediavault and minidlna for music streaming. Still lots of RAM left.

Just wait till all the browser tabs sit down, and need to swap to the floor.

Current 4 year old laptop with 128GB of ECC RAM is wonderful and is used all the time with simulations, LLMs, ML modelling, and the real heavy lifter, Google Chrome.

About 10 years ago I was like "FINE, clearly 512MB of memory isn't enough to avoid swapping hell, I'll get 1 GB of extra memory." ...and that was that!

These days I'm like "4 GB on a single board computer? Oh that's fine. You may need that much to run a browser. And who's going to run a browser regularly on a SBC? ...oh I've done it a lot of times and it's... fine."

The thing I learned is that you can run a whole bunch of SHIT HOT server software on a system with less than a gigabyte of memory. The moment you run a web browser? FUCK ALL THAT.

And that's basically what I found out long ago. I had a laptop that had like 32 megs of memory. Could be a perfectly productive person with that. Emacs. Darcs. SSH over a weird USB Wi-Fi dongle. But running a web browser? Can't do Firefox. Opera kinda worked. Wouldn't work nowadays, no. But Emacs probably still would.

I remember building my gaming machine in 2008 and put 4GB (2x2) in, then RAM prices tanked 6 months later so I added another 4GB. I remember having lots of conversations where I was like "yeah, 8GB is over kill" but what I didn't expect is that it was such overkill that when I built my next machine in 2012, I still only put 8GB on it.

It wasn't until 2019 that I built a machine and put 16GB in it. I ran on 8GB for over a decade. Pretty impressive for gaming.

I have 32GB and regularly fill both that and my swap space to the point where my system freezes up and i have to restart.

i am quite tabby though. And vscode has become quite a memory hog and i usually have several of those open too as i work across different projects

The other day I got a Mini PC to use as a home server (including as media server with Kodi).

It has 8GB of RAM, came with some Windows (10 or 11), didn't even try it and wiped it out, put Lubunto on it and a bunch of services along with Kodi.

Even though it's running X in order to have Kodi there and Firefox is open and everything, it's using slightly over 2GB of RAM.

I keep wanting to upgrade it to 16 GB, because, you know, I just like mucking about with hardware and there's the whole new toy feeling, but I look at the memory usage and just can't bring myself around to do it just for fun, as it would be a completelly useless upgrade and not even bright eyed uuh, shinny me can convince adult me to waste 60 bucks on something so utterly completelly useless.

Hmm. But have you tried it with second and third linuxes? What about eightses?

Someone clearly doesn’t play Cities: Skylines with mods

This is my server and about 28GB sits unused. Just in case I might want to run a new VM or something... 🤣

Much like a cat can stretch out and somehow occupy an entire queen-sized bed, Linux will happily cache your file system as long as there is available memory.

If that picture was of a Windows installation, Windows would be a Sumo Wrestler instead of a kitten.

4GB? I think you should clean up a little, do a like debloating

I actually run 32GB on my desktop with Mint. I run 12GB on my laptop with Mint. Both of these have Celeron CPUs.

I love it.

mount $HOME in tmpfs

Running and LSP on a monorepo will destroy those 4gigs no problem.

Me using jvm based software for work and it barely being enough...

When I start editing in Davinci Resolve....well, that's why I went from 32 to 64 a few years ago.

The cat is the Rimworld mod with a hefty memory leak yesterday. 32 GB was full in seconds. But it gave me enough time to find the culprit and kill Rimworld without trashing my session every time.

"Free" memory is actually usually used for cache. So instead of waiting to get data from the disk, the system can just read it directly from RAM after the first access. The more RAM you have, the more free space you'll have to use for cache. My machine often has over 20GB of RAM used as cache. You can see this with free -m. IIRC both Gnome and KDE's system managers also show that now.

I installed 64gb of ram on my gaming laptop and Chrome took all of it.

Now snap some pics of this kitty laying in different places all over this couch; you now have a new meme: Address Space Layout Randomization.