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8GB of RAM wasn't enough for me to use in either person or professional contexts in 2006. My work laptop has 16GB and I'm constantly running low on RAM when I'm working with spreadsheets and relatively simple Photoshop projects. I'm not talking about games or compiling code either.
I would not be looking at systems with fewer than 16GB of RAM for any user for any reason in 2024. And for myself I would not be buying any systems with fewer than 32GB of RAM.
(My personal desktop has 64GB and so far that's been sufficient but I have nearly capped it out when running substance painter, blender, unity, etc.)
So it really all comes down to the software you use. But my advice is to consider 16GB the absolute minimum.
Just to note for anyone reading this later on. Being low on ram doesn't mean you need more ram, Modern operating systems, especially Windows and MacOS prefer to utilise all available ram, it's hard to guage how much you need because of this. To be safe if you're buying a Laptop or Desktop for professional use in 2024 16gb is the minimum and 32gb is recommended.
Apple claims their OS needs less RAM (I have no clue) but for OP running Windows 8GB is no where near enough.
They can claim that all they want to, but once you actually start running stuff on the computer that's BS. Accessing the same website in the same browser on different platforms will use the same amount of RAM. Opening the same files on different platforms will use the same amount of RAM.
RAM is where things are put for active use, and it turns out that all files are the size of their content regardless of platform and thus take up the same amount of space in use.
While the base OS of one vendor might have a smaller foot print than the other, that doesn't matter once you actually start using the damn thing. If you spec your machine on the misguided marketing that "you need less RAM" your gonna have slower load times and longer waits when switching between apps as the OS needs to access the storage.
My work laptop is a MBpro with 32gb of RAM. It is very easy to max out it's RAM and with an unbounded swap system very easy to max out my disk space too. When that happens it's a bad crash and lost work.
My personal computer is a custom built desktop running Windows and Linux with 64gb of RAM. It is harder to max out it's RAM though I have done so and it frequently uses more than 32gb of RAM.
OP didn’t sound like they’re the sort of person who needs to run those kinds of applications. They definitely didn’t state requirements like that, and if they did then they probably wouldn’t be asking how much RAM they need, they’d already know.
Brother what do you do that you nee sso much RAM
All sorts of things. I'm a programmer by trade and run several docker containers concurrently for a couple of different products I work on. It's not uncommon that I have to troubleshoot opening a file that is several gigabytes in size.
By hobby, I make video games and some of my assets are pre-rendered simulations that get saved. I, admittedly, like pushing my machine as far as I can on resolution so some of those simulations absolutely take a toll. I also just like fucking around in Blender, minor video editing, don't close out my browser tabs, and have been known to run multiple video games simultaneously (like playing a survival game with a friend and leaving it running when he's gotta go. Then I just start up some other game in the meantime).
All told, not everything I do is necessarily orthodox, but it works well for me and I take full advantage of all my hardware.
Using docker as an example of using more ram doesn't really make sense as the use for docker is containerisation for optimising system resources.
You do need to allocate memory to it though, and that subtracts from the pool of system RAM available for other purposes.
Well except in Linux's case when you use zram anyway. It compresses a pool of RAM. I usually compress almost all of my RAM and generally hover around and 2:1 ratio with lz4.
Windows 10+ also compresses a pool of RAM but it is a terrible ratio and seems to hover around 1:1.1. Nothing to write home about.
Apple has low memory behaviour way better optimized than Windows, so running at 8GB will not be as painful as it is with windows - but in the background the OS will constantly shuffle stuff around to avoid running out of memory, which costs performance.
16GB is the bare minimum for computer nowadays - and that applies to macs as well. I'm currently using a 16GB air m1 for some things, and I also regularly run into performance issues due to memory limits without doing heavy stuff.