I’ve been okay with 16 for a while. I use ViM as my editor, and occasionally VSCode. I use a single desktop, but I generally have a half dozen or more tmux tabs for various parts of the project.
That said, I’ve been feeling a bit squeezed with 16GB. The main RAM consumers are:
Firefox - I frequently have 100 tabs open, so it takes a few GBs RAM
Docker - running most of our app (a dozen or so microservices) takes 3-4GB if I’m careful about turning stuff off that I don’t need, 5-6 if I’m not
Teams and Slack - especially during calls, these use a lot
So I think 16GB should be the minimum, and 24GB should be average. I’m going to be adding another 16GB to my personal development machine (hobbies and whatnot), and my work laptop can’t be upgraded (MacBook), but I’ll be upgrading to an M3 or M4 soonish and will request more RAM.
8GB is probably fine if you’re just running a browser and that’s it. If you’re doing anything else, 16GB should be the minimum.
I’ve been okay with 16 for a while. I use ViM as my editor, and occasionally VSCode. I use a single desktop, but I generally have a half dozen or more tmux tabs for various parts of the project.
That said, I’ve been feeling a bit squeezed with 16GB. The main RAM consumers are:
So I think 16GB should be the minimum, and 24GB should be average. I’m going to be adding another 16GB to my personal development machine (hobbies and whatnot), and my work laptop can’t be upgraded (MacBook), but I’ll be upgrading to an M3 or M4 soonish and will request more RAM.
8GB is probably fine if you’re just running a browser and that’s it. If you’re doing anything else, 16GB should be the minimum.