>and each application should play nice with the system resources, so even if RAM is cheap and plentiful it doesn't automatically mean that every application should feel entitled to it.
Yes, you shouldn't be a bad neighbor, but the OS will generally move things around to accommodate you as necessary. RAM is an afterthought for most of these applications for a reason.
This attitude is like buying a sports car and never redlining it.
> Yes, you shouldn't be a bad neighbor, but the OS will generally move things around to accommodate you as necessary.
I'm not sure what you mean with that. The OS will not "move things around" to the point where the resource abuse wont be noticeable, all it can do is swap stuff to the disk, perhaps compress some RAM and maybe unload any cold code (though code doesn't that that much RAM) and all that take time, slowing down the system.
> RAM is an afterthought for most of these applications for a reason.
Yes and that reason is disinterest from the application developers for RAM usage.
> This attitude is like buying a sports car and never redlining it.
Sports cars have nothing to do with this, i do not see the relevance.
At least on Linux swap is a great tool for shuffling things you probably statistically wont use again out while retaining the ability to transparently recall them if it turns out your system guessed wrong.
If you find yourself in a situation where your OS is actually shuffling things around for your system to function you will find your performance and desktop experience has gone to absolute dog shit. It's entirely likely that the user will actually hard reboot the machine because they conclude it has frozen.
The absolutely only way to have a nice desktop experience in Linux is to ensure you have enough ram for all the things you intend to run at once which means have at least 8GB-16GB of RAM and don't run too many app once from people who think unused RAM is wasted RAM.
> don't run too many app once from people who think unused RAM is wasted RAM
The baseline memory usage of Svelte NodeGUI is 20 MB. 400 instances of that can fit into 8 GB of RAM. Don't you even try to tell me that you've run 400 separate GUI applications at once.
Let me repeat it again: unused RAM is wasted RAM. This is a fact. It does nothing when neither you nor the OS is using it - and the value of the OS using a byte of RAM for caching is tiny compared to the value of you using it for an application you care about.
The above also has nothing to do with wasting RAM. If you've spent any significant amount of time developing programs for actual users (read: not programmers), you'll know that development is a complex, multi-variable tradeoff - and one of the biggest trade-offs is RAM usage for performance, so if you solely optimize for minimal RAM usage, you'll always (except for the most trivial of programs written specifically as a counterexample to this claim) end up sacrificing performance.
The wastefulness of 1 GB of RAM usage varies wildly depending on whether you're running a video editing program on a large file (hey, that's not that bad!) or a simple textual chat application. 20 MB for a graphical tool is an acceptable tradeoff in the vast majority of use-cases.
Any time you actually say this delete the sentence if you want anyone to actually read what you are saying. I made no assertions specifically about NodeGUI. The idea I was responding to is
> the OS will generally move things around to accommodate you as necessary
Because this isn't accurate performance goes to hell when applications contend for ram. If you haven't noticed it you probably have enough ram to not have that issue not because your OS "moved stuff around" at least on windows/linux I have never owned a mac.
> Most users have enough RAM unless they're running on some absurdly low 4GB< device, which is just nowhere near as common these days.
Citation needed. My experience with people outside the tech bubble is that they don’t know what RAM is, and will not consider it when purchasing a computer. Most of these people now also live primarily on a phone or tablet too, because their computers are too slow.
Yes, you shouldn't be a bad neighbor, but the OS will generally move things around to accommodate you as necessary. RAM is an afterthought for most of these applications for a reason.
This attitude is like buying a sports car and never redlining it.