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Comment by dlivingston | Hacker News Reader

1.25% of Elon Musk's net worth is $5.2 billion dollars, but buying, I don't know, a new PC for that price would not be reasonable.

Okay, bad analogy. My point is: just because your budget is high and you've got bytes to burn doesn't mean all those bytes should be burned.

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Paying for RAM and having it sit around doing nothing is stupid.

It's not doing nothing. It's caching frequently accessed files on my filesystem, which generally speeds everything up especially with HDDs. Why should someone instead waste that on a needlessly bloated music player?

…HDDs?

Hard disk drive

I don’t think it’s possible to find computers selling today with one of those.

If you open one of those bad boys up you'll find you can swap out and even add parts.

Regardless, RAM for disk cache is still useful on SSDs and my point still stands.

Paying for RAM because a dozen different programs can't be bothered to make user focused software is stupid.

That choice is for me, the user, to make. App developers don't get to make it for me. If apps are smaller, then I can use that memory to run more apps, cache things, etc.

So choose not to use the app, dear god this conversation is awful.

So choose not to partake the discussion, dear god this conversation is awful.

I do. The instant I saw it uses Electron, I decided the app wasn't for me and closed the tab. But why would that mean I shouldn't participate in a discussion (which I didn't even start myself) on whether the excessive RAM usage is ok?

This is why inflation is rampant.

This is true for autoscaling VMs which run one application and when underutilized the load is reconsolidated.

It is NOT true for desktops which run different applications all the time, the user often switches between them, and where uncommitted memory is automatically used by the kernel as disk cache space.

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