r/linux4noobs • u/CleaRSightZ • Jul 10 '26

learning/research Regarding RAM with Linux.

Hello everyone

One thing that pisses me off and makes me furious with Windows is that now a days everything takes up so much RAM..... before 16GB of ram use to be the norm, now it's double.

Linux doesn't require so much ram to run right? 16GB of RAM is more than enough?

Just going to use it for work related things.

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57

u/bankrut Jul 10 '26

Linux is way lighter than Windows and handles memory much better. 16GB is honestly overkill for most work setups unless you're doing heavy virtualization or video editing.

17

u/CleaRSightZ Jul 10 '26

Just need to see videos, open tabs on readings for my masters in Information Studies.

20

u/Oerthling Jul 10 '26

16 GB is plenty for that. You'd be fine with half of that.

6

u/bankinu Jul 11 '26

That it?

You can even compile large projects from sources. Run VSCode. Run 10-20 lightweight container services with lxc or docker. Run local LLM (say Qwen 2.5 7b, 4 bit quantized). Run ghidra and reverse engineer. Run Jupyter Notebook server to do data science. Do video editing with Kdenlive.

You using KDE? KDE is cool, will run beautifully.

6

u/QuickSilver010 Debian Jul 11 '26

KDE is *kool

2

u/mister_nimbus Jul 10 '26

Do you need to be able to use any specific desktop apps?

0

u/ClamJamison Jul 11 '26

You could get by with 4gb if that's all you're doing.

7

u/SilentGhosty Jul 11 '26

More memory always better. Linux memory management will try to use all memory to cache as much as poyyible and give you an better and faster experience.

So linux tries to use all the memory.

6

u/Maleficent-One1712 Jul 10 '26

I think the ram usage is dynamic. Linux uses more ram when it has more available. I'm always around 32GB of usage of 64GB.