The RAM footprints of most development tools on Linux are also less than on other operating systems, due to shared libraries and not just shipping every dependency bundled with binaries. A developer on OSX told me he was close to maxing out his 16gigs of RAM, blaming it on having to run 2 vagrant VMs simultaneously while working. While I wasn't able to establish a conclusive cause of his sizeable memory consumption (he was busy), I spun up 3 vagrant VMs of my own, simulated work, and opened/visited many more sites in Firefox to try to hog resources. I could hardly break 4 gigs of RAM used (out of 16), in Ubuntu 14.04. 8 gigs might not actually be so bad if you're doing development work using tools that aren't shipped as complete packages, but rather adhere to the unix philosophy.