Exactly. The issue today is that even if you optimize your OS and DE to be very memory efficient, it matters very little as soon as you open a modern web browser. And without a modern web browser a big part of the online experience is broken.
Linux is already pretty decent on memory even with a DE like gnome/cinnamon running. I have an 15 year old laptop with Cinnamon / Arch and it uses 700-800MB once booted.
Frequently the issue isn't memory (I've maxed the memory out at 8GB).
Older systems have issues with composing the web pages itself. A lot of people blame JS, but a lot of the time JS isn't the issue e.g VSCode & Discord runs nicely on the laptop.
e.g. YouTube has a feature called ambient mode, this adds like a white gradient around the video element. On old intel iGPUs this absolutely wrecks video playback performance and you get about 15FPS video. Turning this off the video plays smoothly. The backdrop IIRC is a CSS gradient, the GPU/CPU doesn't have the grunt to render the backdrop gradient with the video on top at a smooth FPS.
So while you might have the memory for the extra tabs, browsing can be a sluggish experience because the GPU/CPU just can't execute the code on the page well.
Eh, kinda. Work forces me to have Jira, Confluence, Gitlab, Copilot, the other Copilot formerly known as Outlook, the other other Copilot formerly known as Teams, as well as Slack of course, and a dozen other webslop apps open… and it still all fits in <8GB RAM.
Which is a lot worse than the <1GB you'd get with well-optimized native tools, but try running Win11 with "only" 8GB RAM.
I'm convinced the next windows GUI will just be an electron app that runs copilot as the desktop, forcing you to argue with it to open a file or run a program. Doesn't even have titlebars or window buttons or a task bar, just one big copilot bar at the bottom that you can ask whats already running or to close an app. All of this written in JavaScript of course
Unused RAM is wasted. But used RAM is also wasted, sometimes. If I can accomplish the same thing with less RAM, that's better, because it lets me do other things at the same time. It doesn't mean I'm not going to use that RAM, that would be pointless. My desktop running dwm typically idles at ~50GiB RAM usage from random crap I've got running. But I can prove that the desktop is using no more than like 300MiB.
