[mrmondo]

I was about to buy one as a spare, linux-only laptop, I was hoping they'd have 16GB-32GB RAM options (for a price of course), but they don't even have 8GB let alone 16/32... they seem to be stuck with 4GB!?

That's not going to be much good for browsing modern Javascript heavy websites and doing anything else at the same time let alone having a VM or a few apps running in the background.

I'm all for cheap laptops for kids to learn on, basic word processing and things but - this is going to struggle.

[derstander]

I’ve been following the forums and more RAM is often requested. The Pine64 folks have stated that the SoC only supports 4GB RAM. I do wonder, though, about the utility of pairing the rather modest compute capabilities of the SoC with a large amount of RAM.

[cptnapalm]

Disk cache. That's been the great benefit I've had from the excessive amount of RAM I have in my laptop.

[beatgammit]

You won't be running a VM on a doc like this, but 4GB is plenty for most everyday tasks. My laptop running Windows has 4GB RAM, and it runs common web tasks just fine, and I use it regularly for:

- Slack - video meetings - Netflix - Google docs

Honestly, I think you'll be more limited by CPU performance than memory, unless you try to run a VM or something.

I don't know about you, but this is exactly the type of backup laptop I'm looking for. It probably won't be my main laptop for work, but it's plenty for most casual uses. Basically it's replace my Chromebook as a more capable, hackable alternative.

[c256]

Chromebooks usually have 4GB of memory, and many have less. For me, at least, it was a bit of sticker shock, but it’s been fine in practice.

It’s true that you won’t want to spin up full VMs, but this is a dual-Core ARM anyway. For comparison, I frequently use chromebook-chrome, Debian-container Linux apps (usually terminal and emacs), and Android Outlook simultaneously on my chromebook without trouble. That device has a comparatively beefy intel cpu, though.

[ryacko]

I’ve found using Firefox with multi-process disabled reduces memory use to about 300 MB. Mozilla announced they will move the option to disable multi-process from config to somewhere else though.