15 years ago 8 gigabytes of RAM were "wow what am I going to do with all this space" territory.
I was able to run X Windows, Emacs, and gcc for university CS work. I had to use 8 bit psuedocolor graphics to have a decent sized desktop like 1024x768 or 1280x1024 (on a nice CRT).
But, I put it into a swapping frenzy by opening one JPEG that I had downloaded from an academic website. It was a high-resolution scan of some old manuscript, but probably lower pixel count than a typical smartphone photo from this decade.
Doing normal work also involved frequent swapping delays as you launched new programs and evicted old ones.
In what context?
>If I hear that Win11 uses 3GB of RAM idling
Modern Gnome and KDE distros with batteries included also idea at around 2GB RAM which is a useless metric anyway as Windows 11 also preloads frequently used takes and apps on boot.
Really? I'm seeing 1.3 for Mint/Cinnamon.
That leaves about 6.5GB for programs, which I think is acceptable.
Of course, progress needs to be done. Better graphics, more data.. But now all the consumption goes into shitty decoration with is useless and waste resources.
Other big usage is all that ads and tracking shit behind the scene..