I ran with 8gb ram for 7 years because zram would shove my swap into what little ram I had available and it actually worked well enough that I didn't feel like upgrading until this year lol.
Yeah, but when it comes to RAM and Storage, the other golden rule is that the longer you delay your upgrade the cheaper it will be (assuming you'll even need it) or the more you can get for the same money.
never had issues with gnome on my laptop with 4 gbs of ddr3, actually it's pretty smooth even while running from an 8 year old 5200rpm hdd, even with all the animations and stuff enabled.
freezes a bit while loading icons in the app menu for the first time after boot but it's really usable once everything gets cached to ram.
Your experience matches mine more than op's. In fact I have a super shitty old laptop running gnome on fedora with a 32gb drive and I think 4 GB of RAM, maybe less, and it still sounds better than the experience they're claiming to have had with 6 gb ram.
this was a few years back around gnome 41 maybe, who knows if things have changed since then or if something was just really wrong with my install. can’t really test anymore because i kind of already upgraded the pc
yeah you need to mess around with snappiness to avoid that
(so either increase it to make it unload stuff to hdd earlier, leaving more ram for critical stuff, or decrease it to like 5 in order to make it only use swap when absolutely needed)
basically just mess around with it and see what value works best. i my case 10-15 works more or less okay-ish under full ram load
