this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2024
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While 8GB is typically enough for Linux today, it may not be enough a few years from now. Buying a laptop with 8GB of soldered in RAM would limit the useful life of it.
It will probably depend on distro. Some distros might get more bloated, but I think most won't do anything that makes them unusable on lower-spec hardware, especially those that specifically have low system requirements as one of their core tenets.
Everything seems to get more bloated over time. An 8GB system probably won't become unusable soon, but things will certainly begin to run less smoothly to the point that many people would replace the computer. Browsers and electron apps are RAM hogs.
It depends on the use case, but for what it's worth on a 4GB Android tablet, I can run VSCode + Chromium/Firefox via Termux without too much trouble. ~2GB of memory is taken by Android, so 8GB on a proper Linux system is more like 3x more memory available. It would take a massive amount of bloat to make an impact. My main concern would like with websites being wasteful with both memory and CPU usage via JS, rather than the browser itself becoming bloated.