Yep, browsing, developing, listening to music all alright on 8GB, could probably run on even 4.
My memory idles on around 3341MiB with a browser and just a few basic daemons like Syncthing used in mint cinnamaon. 4GB is pretty tight unless you are willing to make some behavioural changes or use a less friendly distro. But 8GB is more than enough.
Different story trying to run VMs on my server, though.
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.
Just to run the OS sure, but what about the ever enlarging bloated software?
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.
