this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
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I can't speak for Macs. But in the Linux world, 8GB is fine. In Windows it's awful because of all that bloat. I'm guessing Macs fair better for OS efficiency.
Macs don't have copilot so that's like 4GB saved right there
Ha ha ha. True!
Can it be debloated? I might do that for my parents home PC.
Idk about copilot, this is my recommended debloat tool
8GB of ram on Macs is fine for work and medium photo/video editing, as long as you have plenty of SSD space and don’t use Apple Intelligence.
People forget that MacOS is UNIX at its core.
I'm running Mint on an 8GB laptop and I'm surprised by just how much can be running at one time. Right now I'm running Firefox with 10 open tabs, Waterfox with 8 tabs, Thunderbird, Keepass, Calibre, Signal, a Whatsapp client, Syncthing, Libreoffice Writer with 2 open docs & Calc with 2 open small spreadsheets, a couple of terminals and Gedit, and didn't even notice it until came across these comments. A friend who uses Windows 11 says 32GB is recommended now.
Microsoft must be thrilled with age verification being required at the OS level. What a great way to lock people into their Microslop garbage.
Oh......I guess I'm the only one who opens firefox, and literally thousands of tabs.
One day I closed one window and it said "Are you sure you want to close 158 tabs?"
I said yes. It was one window. I had 23 more windows.
When I get to 20 or so I have to start closing some tabs to keep track of things. How do you find the tab you're looking for when you have that many open?
Tab search.
Tab groups.
Color coding.
I use sideberry addon on Firefox and workspaces in Vivaldi.
Even without any extensions, there is a shortcut in Firefox to search and switch to a tab by typing % on the address bar
Zen (firefox (gecko) derivative, No AI, focus on decluttered interface) has bloody excellent tab management these days, workspaces, folders, horizontal tab lists (like sideberry), essentials (tab icons pinned to the top), auto unload, all built in, and everything disappears when reading a page.
Literally thousands? Have you tried bookmarking things after they've sat unused for awhile?
I typically just periodically save my browser windows with a tab manager extension. I just say because thousands sounds like way too much to keep track of...
I rarely have more than 10 tabs open on my phone, and rarely more than 5 in my PC. How do people have so many tabs?
Get Sideberry for your sanity.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/
https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery
I literally have over a thousand tabs open in one window.
8Gb ram. Mint. 10+ year old pc.
This is the computing equivalent to hoarding.
I’m running Arch on a Macbook Air with 2GB of RAM. Its limited, but it does what I want it to.
on my work PC at the moment (lovely little AMD 5700u mini-pc with 16Gb ram) I have a debloated LTSC build on W11 and two profiles of firefox running with a total of 25 tabs, a couple of them are more complex web apps but most are static pages, plus a couple of file browser, an old dumb custom invoicing app we use (~2003 application so its very light) and a VNC viewer with another machine running.
7.9gb of ram use.
it's not that bad really, I mean it's a lot for just mostly websites but we know they arent as light as they used to be, 8gb would be too little since I need some dedicated for Vram as I run 3 displays but I certainly dont need much more than 16.
I did have 32gb in this machine at first since I was doing some light photoshop and basic CAD/CAM, but it very rarely exceeded 16gb, so I cut it back and it's been absolutely fine.
If you give windows more ram, it will use more ram as a baseline of course, unused ram is wasted ram.
Many entry level MacBooks of the last decade have probably been 8 GB. I have a M1 MacBook Air and that is 8 GB. It is fine for me.
Yeahhhhh no
But it is for most people.
Most people still browse bloated websites, doesn't matter what OS you're using 8GB is going to be tight.
As a web developer… what?? If your website needs 8GB on the client to run there are serious, deeply ingrained problems with your front end. I recently scoffed at coworkers who wanted 8GB of memory for just one instance of their web server — I can’t even fathom how cursed the codebase is if the browser plows through 8GB of RAM on a page load.
8GB wouldn't be one site, but between the OS & a couple of bloated sites 8GB is easy to hit.
Exactly. I am not a heavy user but occasionally I need to multitask a bit. I upgraded from 16 gb to 32 gb a while back because with 4 open workspaces, a browser window in each one plus an email client, signal, a couple libreoffice apps open, and my notes app, it was having to use enough swap space that I noticed the performance hit. I've had to use some very poorly optimized sites for work that literally used a gig of ram for one tab. A small number of very light users might be ok with 8gb, but most will likely have issues.
And that's why we have adblockers
Again, no.
Different people use computers for different things you know.
My old laptop is running Pop!OS on 8gigs really well. I mostly do document editing, vector graphics, and a little light gaming. Have not updated to COSMIC yet so will see how that goes. I definitely dont load it up like my beefy desktop though.
Been enough for me.
So I presume you're saying that the entire system shouldn't slow down when Firefox starts swapping?
The only time I ever use more than 8gb on my M4 Mac Mini is when I run a Win 11 VM through Parallels
I use mainly Linux but Mac is more efficient with RAM than Linux is also. By a significant amount.
What?
I use OSX for work and Linux on my personal laptop, that hasn't been my experience at all
There are some advantages macOS can have but it depends on usage patterns and user knowledge:
To clarify, some versions of Linux are lighter weight with resources, and macOS does tend to take up more RAM at rest to make things pull up snappier, if you have it to spare. But their compression algorithm is better, and if you are using near the limit, it will be more efficient with the use of the RAM you have available before lagging. With Windows and Linux, it feels more like if you're out of RAM you're out if RAM. It's less likely to happen at all on Linux though.
MacOS doesn't shove the system UI components into swap when Firefox uses too much memory.
How so? I have a work Mac and it uses more ram in general despite both the Mac and my personal laptop both employing memory compression and caching.