Is it just me or is 16GB even on the low side for a pro user? I have 128 on my desktop and 80GB usage is normal for what I do (software dev; lots of local virtualization)

[–] vinceman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

All I do is game and stream, occasionally edit some photos and 32GB is the minimum for me now.

[–] locuester@lemmy.zip 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Yeah, this is pretty much what I thought. So I don’t understand why people are pretending that eight or 16 is going to cut it.

Maybe they are just happy purposefully limiting usage due to a constraint that they don’t realize is easy to raise.

I like to have 3 4k monitors and four desktops and 10 chrome tabs opened on each one along with SQL stuff and a half dozen vscode windows, and a full visual studio or 2, wsl2 running with a dozen docker containers, plus all of the collaboration programs like Telegram and Discord. And I don’t like to close any of that down when I go play flight simulator. So the extra couple hundos is nothing so that I can be sure to never run out of ram.

[–] miss_brainfart@lemmy.ml 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The M3 is powerful enough that even 32GB can be a constraint for what you'd be able to run on it

[–] locuester@lemmy.zip 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

That entirely depends on if what you’re running requires lots of ram or is more cpu bound. I wouldn’t conflate the two as directly related.

[–] miss_brainfart@lemmy.ml 2 points 7 months ago

That's true, but unless you're 100% sure that you'll only ever run a workload that fits those specs, I think you'd rather like having the extra memory.

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 2 points 7 months ago

Answer probably depends on the nature of your usage?

I have a 16gb m1 air, and it is okay for development, but i dont have any VMs (except docker i guess, and also android VMs). I have run out of RAM once, with multiple pycharm/clion/browser windows open. Its not great, but its livable. I run out of screen realestate first usually. I use it for personal projects to kill time on trains, so not super heavy stuff.

But otherwise yeah, more is better. I have 64 gb in my desktop and 96gb in my work PC, and occasionally i can hit the limits there.