> https://wiki.debian.org/RISC-V#ASIC_implementations.2C_i.e._.22real.22_CPU_chips
> lists only "small" SoC systems , not something that looks like I would
> like to compile something the size of LibreOffice on. In that list the
> highest memory supported seems to be 8GB... Nowadays software seems to
> be _very_ memory hungry, my desktop isn't running anything particular
> (just X11, XFCE, terminals, mutt, emacs, firefox, instant messenging
> stuff, nextcloud desktop) and... "free -m" says 10437 used (I
> understand that's _without_ buffers and cache), Firefox clearly takes
> at least 2GB if not 3B (main process 1GB RES in top and then many
> "Isolate Web Content" processes taking 100MB to 340MB, they add up!),
> Telegram has RES of 600MB plus 465MB swapped (!!!), etc.
Reminds me: back around the beginning of the 2010s I realized that the
3GB limit on my Thinkpad T60 would be a problem in the long run but most
replacements were either wider (hence not fitting in my backpack) or
shorter (hence losing screen real-estate), so I bought a second hand T61
with the same size and aspect ratio, but with a chipset which could go
up to 8GB.
Nowadays my main laptop is that T61 (with 8GB) and
my office desktop is a Librem mini (with 24GB of RAM).
While Linux manages to make use of all 24GB of that desktop (including
pushing a few hundred MBs to the small swap partition I have
configured), I noticed that my T61 is able to perform the exact same
tasks without swapping either.
Better yet: my T61's right hinge broke recently (for the third time:
there seems to be a weakness there), so for a few weeks I temporarily
used my T60 while waiting for new hinges to arrive. Much to my
surprise, I didn't suffer from its limited RAM. Stats show that the
swap is used significantly more, but it never got anywhere
near thrashing: the CPU was always kept busy with useful work.
[ All those machines use SSDs, of course. ]
So, maybe there's a "good" reason why Apple still configures their
cheapest laptop with only 8GB of RAM: for "normal" work it's still
perfectly sufficient, despite all the best efforts of web site designers
out there.
[ But I would recommend against buying a desktop/laptop with 8GB now
unless you can easily expand it later. ]
Stefan
PS: To give some context, my main tools are a mix of
XFCE/Emacs/Firefox/xterm/Git/LaTeX/GCC/OCaml/LibreOffice/Coq.
And I use the `i386` rather than `amd64` version of Debian on those
machines (tho with an `amd64` kernel).
