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.
The only time I ever use more than 8gb on my M4 Mac Mini is when I run a Win 11 VM through Parallels
So I presume you're saying that the entire system shouldn't slow down when Firefox starts swapping?
Macs don't have copilot so that's like 4GB saved right there
Ha ha ha. True!
8GB of ram is more than 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 8BG 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.
I’m running Arch on a Macbook Air with 2GB of RAM. Its limited, but it does what I want it to.
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.
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?
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...
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?
Even without any extensions, there is a shortcut in Firefox to search and switch to a tab by typing % on the address bar
Tab search.
Tab groups.
Color coding.
I use sideberry addon on Firefox and workspaces in Vivaldi.
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.
Glance is the most used feature on Zen for me. Everything else I like Firefox for more, but that damn Glance feature really helps me when doing research or looking into things! I NEED it for Firefox! :'(
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.
Yeah sidebery is the goat. I too have thousands of tabs open.
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.
Not "probably". They were. For the last decade, up until like last year. And they were awful, and a ripoff. At least they're not trying to charge $1k+ for this one.
Hard disagree. I have the same MacBook Air and it’s still crazy fast. What are y’all really doing that more RAM is so necessary?
A handful of apps and a few browser tabs will do it. I can go through twice that fairly frequently.
Probably having thousands of Chrome tabs open.
Ugh, I see this on people’s computers at work during screen sharing. First off, Chrome is the clunkiest browser you could possibly use on macOS and second, why so many tabs? How do y’all docs with 20 tabs open — like you can’t even see titles?
You don't need to see the titles (and you can always see them with vertical tabs anyway). There are good cases for having many tabs open. It's just that chrome is terrible at dealing with them.
And the RAM upgrade prices have been a consistent Apple profit center for over 20 years now.
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
MacOS doesn't shove the system UI components into swap when Firefox uses too much memory.
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.
There are some advantages macOS can have but it depends on usage patterns and user knowledge:
Dynamic swap and zswap aren't really the same as efficient ram usage it's just good ways to mitigate when you run out. But when your using actual swap it's in my experience more noticable on OSX than Linux, which at least for me remains responsive until you're using a lot of swap.
Maybe Arch & Flatpak users hit this, but avoiding multiple versions of the same library is what distros exist for and avoiding loading different frameworks is what Desktop Environments are for. Although the ability to restore apps after closing them is pretty sweet and built in to OSX in a way that lets me safely kill apps to reduce the memory I'm using.
I think the main reason my Linux setup consumes less memory is probably because I used Kate for most file editing instead of vscode, which is probably an unfair advantage to Linux.
I disagree. If the OS automatically identifies unneeded pages and compresses them or swaps them out, it’s certainly using the physical memory more efficiently than if it wasn’t doing these things.
But they can’t if the applications they want to ship don’t all use the same version. E.g. Ubuntu ships GTK 2, 3, and 4. Arch even still ships GTK 1 in addition to these three.
What happens is you run KDE but then you still want to run Firefox so you still need GTK.
Yeahhhhh no
But it is for most people.
Again, no.
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.
They said websites, not website
8GB wouldn't be one site, but between the OS & a couple of bloated sites 8GB is easy to hit.
I have 13 tabs open over two browsers (Safari and Firefox) and a text editor open on my Mac and I’m using 1.82GB
M1 Max MacStudio
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
Been enough for me.
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.
Different people use computers for different things you know.
I use my computer for simple tasks and can power through double that pretty easily. My family is full of Mac sheep who are constantly coming to me to make their computers faster and I have to tell them I can't help because their machine was deliberately kneecapped by the OEM and there's no way to fix it. Fortunately one of them just upgraded to the new Air w/ 16GB and they remark how much faster it is. Obviously it's faster in lots of other ways, but none of those would do anything if they were still capped at 8GB.
It's basically iOS at that point.
MacOS is like 6 gb of ram doing nothing