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Comment by bxparks | Hacker News Reader

Is 4GB enough with the current web browsers and web pages? It feels like 8GB is the minimum for normal users, and 16GB is the minimum for software developers. I have a 4GB Chromebook and a 4GB MacBookAir, and they are both somewhat painful to use these days, even with ad blockers.

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I have never owned a computer with more than 4GB of RAM. It's fine as long as you don't embed separate copies of chromium in your text editor, IRC-substitute, and music player.

I'm impressed that you can be productive with 4GB. On my dev laptop, I am often hitting 14-15GB usage. Chrome, Docker, NodeJS, and VSCode are the main culprits. I'm upgrading the machine to 32GB this weekend.

More RAM -- and using the ECC kind -- definitely improved my compilation speeds.

But maybe your workflow doesn't include compilation?

Was that a non sequitur or are you saying that ECC ram had an impact on compilation speed?

Which browser? I've had zero problems with 4GB laptops when avoiding Chrome

Can't avoid Chrome on a Chromebook. On the MBA, I use Chrome as well. I've migrated to Firefox on my Windows and Linux laptops, but I thought Firefox had battery issues on MacOS.

I usually keep about 5-7 pinned tabs open (Gmail, Contact, Calendar, Keep, Drive, HackerNews, etc) and cycle through ~3-7 transient tabs, and I find that the browsing experience is not enjoyable on 4GB machines anymore.

I don't have any distinct cpu/memory/battery profiling datasets to provide anything but a personal anecdote. I dropped Chrome due to general laptop responsiveness in favour of a combo of Firefox with AdNausem and Privacy Badger. Which, has worked fine for my use (not noticed any adverse battery effects but I've also not been actively monitoring), though I don't use nearly the number of google services you've listed. Your results may differ, I've heard mixed reviews (again, anecdotally, so take with a grain of salt) of google services in firefox and safari.

> but I thought Firefox had battery issues on MacOS.

Does it still, are you referring to 70+? Firefox 70 in October came with big improvements[1], I didn't do any testing though. I think I saw some benchmarks showing it's slightly worse than Chrome, but it was minor. Can't find them right now unfortunately.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/10/firefox-70-brings-en...

> Can't avoid Chrome on a Chromebook

It is deeply psychologically jarring, but Firefox runs through the Android and I think Linux compat layers on a Chromebook just fine. I have no idea how much this actually buys you when the OS is by Google for running Chrome, but it does work.

Which Chrome-avoidant browser?

Firefox, IE, Safari, or Edge (but not Edge Beta) to name a few. IIRC, there's Pale Moon or something else based off Firefox as well.

4G or 8G to me the most impactful is cpu/gpu. hardware rendering lets the cpu cool off. Without it webpages will peg the cpu, heating or throttling. Very annoying no matter the ram.

This laptop's bigger brother, the Motile M142, has 8GB and a faster CPU. I got one last month for $299 and I'm very happy so far. Runs Ubuntu great.

I have chrome and firefox running, 20 tabs between the two, some heavy ones (google doc, gmail), iterm and PDFs with preview on an MBA 4GB, no issues, memory pressure in activity monitor is still green. One little nitpick, my dev enviroment is on a remote 4GB VM ;)

What applications do you run that make it so bad for you?

I have quite a few more tabs open at any point in time including some large spreadsheets so 8GB tends to be my minimum before I start noticing on Windows/Firefox even with an M2 SSD. Firefox alone is at 4GB for me. This is also my fault for not snoozing/bookmarking aggressively.

i run intelij idea, firefox, dbeaver, spotify, and a regular python stack and that's enough to consume the 8gb ram that i have on my matebook 13. and when all ram is consumed and it hits swap it's so slow that i get hicups, and that with ssd. i tweaked idea to use less ram, and if and i can keep it below 7.x it works ok. i have no idea how u can use anything with 4gb. on my macbook it's the same but i dont get hickups if i hit more then 16gb on my machine.

Xiaomi Mi Book 12.5 also has 4 GB and it's really snappy and good enough for me with a tiling WM and Emacs. Sadly not sold outside China anymore.

Any other cheap machines worth considering? This was fantastic given build quality, fanless m3 Intel CPU and all Intel components.

Acer usually has something comparable.

2gb is for the gpu so it’s really 2gb verses 6gb

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