this post was submitted on 05 May 2026
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My laptop is for super basic needs (i.e. not modern gaming), and I struggle to find ways to run out of its 8GB of RAM without outright fabricating the conditions to make it happen. Even when I play something like Surroundead, I'm short on graphical horsepower and still have RAM to spare.
One major detail is that I'm not using Windows.
My work machine, however, is on Win11 and only has 16 GB. And unless I turn off OneDrive, Teams and Outlook from autostarting, it will use nearly 12 GB to sit idle. It's pretty useless.
I mean I'm on ubuntu with my current machine, not running anything particularly demanding and using 37 gb of ram.
Just saying, ymmv.
I'm on Kubuntu 24.04 and with 2 FF browsers(1 with 4 tabs the other with ~12), steam, haruna, and discord, I use about 8GB. 10 with OBS and SteamVR. I did go a little overkill with 64GB ram
Used used, or just used? File caches and memory-mapped files are technically "used" but are basically free since they can be evicted if that memory is needed elsewhere.
🐖
What are you even running that used so much memories?
Just fire fox and open office at the moment.. Just a few tabs...
Damn, pretty sure there's something wrong with it. I'm on cachyos and have 16gb of ram, it used around 4gb when idling with Steam running in the background, while using waterfox with 3 youtube tab running video and 4 other tab(yt, ytmusic, protondb, steamdb), the usage goes up to 7gb but slowly go down.
Maybe docker are the one using the memory? Or maybe the idling baseline is always around 25%/30% of total ram available idk.
Yeah its basically all firefox.
Damn, that's crazy
Yeah with firefox its not necessarily how many tabs, but what those tabs are doing.
@TropicalDingdong @psx_crab unused memory is wasted memory, if you didnt have so much memory the programs would free memory
Wow