I'm using 1GB with TWM, DIllo, TUI tools, XTerm, MuPDF and the like. As most tools are small from https://t3x.org, https://luxferre.top and https://howerj.github.io/subleq.htm with EForth, (and I try to use cparser instead of) clang, my requeriments are really tiny.

You can achieve a lot by learning Klong and reading the intro on statistics. And xargs to paralelize stuff. Oh, and vidir to edit directories at crazy speeds with any editor, even nano or gedit if you like them.

16GB is more than fine if you're not doing high-end gaming, or heavy production workloads. No need for debloating.

But it doesn't matter either way, because both 16 and 32GB have what, doubled, tripled? It's nuts. Even if you say "just buy less memory", now is a horrible time to be building a system.

I found web browser tabs eating too much memory when you only have 16GB

Use adblock, stop visiting nasty websites and open less tabs. Problem is easily solved.

That's strange. How many tabs are we talking? Are they running something intense or just ordinary webpages?

I usually end up with a couple of browser windows on each of the 4 virtual desktops, and each window will collect a lot of tabs

With that much RAM, you could fit multiple OSes entirely into memory. That is simply a lot.

Depending on which OS we're talking, this could fit thousands of OSes, this could fit 4000 DOS + windows 3.11 sessions :)

Sure but 32GB DDR5 ram has just jumped from ~$100 to $300+ in a flash. The 2x16GB I have in my recent build went from $105 for the pair to $250 each. $500 total!

SSD’s are also up. Hell I am seeing refurbished enterprise HDD’s at 2x right now. It’s sharp increases basically across the board except for CPU’s/GPU’s.

Every PC build basically just cranked up $400-$600 easily, and that’s not accounting for the impact of inflation over the last few years weakening everyone’s wallets. The $1600 machine I spec’d out for my buddy 5 weeks ago to buy parts for this Black Friday now runs $2k even.

“640K ought to be enough for anybody.” - Bill Gates

there's no reliable evidence he ever uttered that phrase

Doesn't matter. It's folklore.

Hey, hey 16k What does that get you today?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IagZIM9MtLo

It's the websites that are bloated, not the browsers. (Well, maybe they are too, but it's secondary.)

Visit any news site or any Fandom wiki and then check eg Firefox about:memory. It'll be a lot.

And for security reasons, different tabs can't easily share resources like you might expect them to.

I bought a motherboard to build a DIY NAS... takes DDR5 SO-DIMM RAM and only 16gb costs more than double the motherboard (which includes an intel processor)

Help I opened multiple tabs at once.

16GB is more than enough on Linux, but Win11 eats resources like crazy