Raspberry Pi 500 Launches Along With Raspberry Pi Monitor

[moonwalker]

8GB is sufficient for the target audience of tinkerers and most desktop uses, including anyone building the vast majority of open source projects. No one in their right mind is going to be building Chromium on any Pi regardless of how much RAM it has.

Someone with nothing more powerful within their reach is going to be building Chromium if that's what they need to do for whatever project they are working on.

[moonwalker]

I use a 16GB laptop that's always clogged deep into swap in normal usage (plasma with browser, text editor and little else). 16GB is survivable. 8GB, not so much.

Sheesh, how many tabs do you have open in your browser? I had close to ~100 tabs open on PineBook Pro with its mere 4GiB RAM not that long ago, and while it was slow it was still plodding along just fine, the overall VM use was around 10GiB. I didn't have on-disk swap though - that would be too slow and too hard on eMMC, I just used zram with zstd compressor sized to 4x the RAM.

[ayumu]

Sheesh, how many tabs do you have open in your browser? I had close to ~100 tabs open on PineBook Pro with its mere 4GiB RAM not that long ago, and while it was slow it was still plodding along just fine, the overall VM use was around 10GiB. I didn't have on-disk swap though - that would be too slow and too hard on eMMC, I just used zram with zstd compressor sized to 4x the RAM.

Used to be around 700, these days sheer discipline keeps it under 300. I am at 247 right now.

[rclark]

Man, if I have 10 tabs open, that is almost to many. No need for more than that. That's what bookmarks are for... Open, look, close.

[moonwalker]

Man, if I have 10 tabs open, that is almost to many. No need for more than that. That's what bookmarks are for... Open, look, close.

Generally, I would agree. But sometimes when you're neck-deep into researching something, constantly cross-referencing multiple sources, you may end up with many dozens of tabs open. If vast majority of the tools you use for work are web-based and you have to juggle multiple tools at the same time - that can also lead to open tabs accumulating. If you have too many bookmarks already - creating yet another (supposedly temporary) bookmark creates risk that it can easily get lost among all the existing ones. Sadly, because of at least those biggest reasons I'm no stranger to Firefox's tab bar scroll buttons, at least at work. At home, thankfully, I'm usually able to keep my open tabs pretty much down to 0 - most of the time my browser's not even running, unlike at work where it runs nearly 100% of the time.

[rclark]

My browser is open nearly 100% of the time at work too. Must of my 'research' (as a programmer) is simply to lookup how something is done. Use and then close or reuse tab. Nothing I want to keep open forever though. I agree bookmarks are for most used sites (like your favorite news site, where to download latest distro, your bank, etc.).

[moonwalker]

My browser is open nearly 100% of the time at work too. Must of my 'research' (as a programmer) is simply to lookup how something is done. Use and then close or reuse tab. Nothing I want to keep open forever though.

"Simply to lookup how something is done" may be sufficient for relatively straightforward scenarios, but when you have to do something less trivial, like developing/supporting for use cases where traditionally Linux doesn't exactly shine (e.g., various misconfigured corner cases in AD environments), the research tends to become less trivial as well.

But even if I need those reference materials for a while, that's not where the bulk of the open tabs comes from. Most of it comes from the web-based internal tools. E.g., we use something called Quip at work for documents. If I'm writing and then implementing a design doc, I kinda have to keep it open, sometimes for weeks at a time. And then that design doc may be referencing other docs. Then there is OWA (Outlook web access) for email/calendar - that's two tabs all by itself. Bunch of internal tools for managing host fleets, CI/CD pipelines, change management, bug tracking/ticketing, and so on and so forth...