I've been learning about RAM and trying to understand it better. Despite using computers for decades it's not something I knew much about. Back in the day I upgraded a laptop from 4G to 8G and it was instantly and noticeably faster and a more enjoyable experience overall. So I just had a general idea that it was good to upgrade whenever you could, but I think that's changed somewhat. I recently upgraded from 16G DDR4-2400 to 32G DDR4-2666. Well, my computer is 7 yrs old and I kind of decided I'm going to try to stick with it for another 7 yrs so I shelled out for some upgrades. I'd have to say that the RAM upgrade makes almost zero difference to my normal computer use though. I'm not saying I regret it, just that it's totally different than when I doubled the RAM from 4G to 8G on that laptop way back when.
I've noticed in online forums (not necessarily this one, just in general) it seems there are many people who feel using RAM is bad. I think this comes from them reading other content specific to people with very limited amounts of RAM who legitimately need to keep their RAM use down.
I'm not sure if I'm thinking about this correctly, but shouldn't we want to use as much of our RAM as we safely can? For example, the M.2 2280 nvme's have really dropped in price and it's amazing how fast they are. Gen3's are over 3,000 mb/s and Gen4's are 7,200 mb/s. But your RAM is still about 10X faster. I monitor RAM use with Conky, and I'm never anywhere close to using even 1/2 of it. It seems like I should try to get more of the common programs I regularly use into it. Or even some I don't use that often, such as Krita, which loads very slowly for some reason. If I have plenty of RAM, and making sure Krita is loaded into it might make it launch faster, that's good right?
(side note- I'm also going to give GIMP another shot. IDK if there's much difference between GIMP and Krita. Krita is heavy but it does do the things I need it to do very well)
I also want to ask, where do you draw the line? If I understand correctly very bad things can happen if you ever max out your RAM. Occasionally I do some things which do use more RAM, I don't think I've ever been anywhere close to maxxing it but wonder how much do you want to have free during normal use so when you do something more intensive it also has what it needs? I would say that 90% of the time I am only using 20% of my RAM or less. One year ago, I wasn't even monitoring RAM use but I probably would have thought that was GREAT!! Looky! I'm barely using my RAM!! lol. I've almost done 180 flip. Now I think about what programs I use regularly and would they be quicker launching and more responsive if they were loaded into RAM.
I feel somewhat validated in this idea because my buddy got a new Macbook PRO, and one of their selling points is the OS intelligently determines what you use most often and keeps them preloaded, if I understand correctly. I don't think Mac is the only one doing this either.
One last thought - I think this is relative to Puppy Linux because at first I thought I definitely didn't want to boot from a USB. I wanted to install it on my hard drive like most of the other OS's I played with. I also thought I definitely didn't want it to load into RAM on startup. Well, I'm glad I learned how to install Puppy to hard drive and I like it set up that way. But I now realize booting from a USB is also a great way to run Puppy Linux with a few advantages that putting it on hard drive doesn't have. I've also changed my mind completely about loading into RAM on startup and now love that Puppy Linux does that by default, and I leave it that way on my machine.