[freemint]

It depends. If you only develop native command line programs it will more than be enough. But every Slack, Discord, Teams, webmail client, ... you got to have open will cut more into your RAM than you think. If the documentation you work with is not js ridden websites but man pages, txts or pdfs, your workflow allows you to occasionally close all tabs, and you do need to run software with big ram use on an ongoing basis you should be fine. However if those circumstances change you might need to upgrade: - by putting more RAM in the machine - moving parts of your workflow to a different machine and use laptop as "thin-client" - switch machines

At the moment my memory use with 16 GB looks like this:

      total   used    free   shared  buff/cache   available

Mem: 16167816 13526588 1017224 805552 1624004 1420060

Swap: 24838136 10326200 14511936

and i have not found a good way to account for where my memory goes.

[necovek]

"top" then M (Shift M) to sort by memory usage might help.

Note that buffered/cache is aggressively cached filesystem data that is as good as free/available with the Linux kernel.