brent For an emailer and surfer and libre writer user 4 should suffice as a minimum. Doubled at 8, it hums along nicely. ... I cannot tell the difference between 8BG and 16GB. Nothing launches faster, things still buffer, or hiccup when streaming, movies replay imperfectly and identically.
Plasma runs fine on my 11-3180 railroad laptop with 4 GB, although I can push that if I open too many tabs with ads and videos in the browser or open more than 2-3 apps at once. My 7390 daily driver laptop has 16 GB, but it runs fine with 8 GB (RAM allocated to a VM guest OS reduces what is allocated to the host OS, so that is a way to test different RAM levels and that's how I know). I think you are right about 8 GB being the current "sweet spot" for average Linux use.
Because apps and files in use load into RAM, it isn't all that hard to leave 16 GB in the dust with high-end graphics, though, and by extension resource-greedy games. I remember (not fondly) a graphic I was working on for a not-for-profit a 10-12 years ago, which brought 16 GB to its knees. The graphic was huge, because it was 48" x 36" and a high dpi, so just loading the thing along with Photoshop ate 16 GB plus some, and threw me into swap.
It all depends on what you are doing, I guess, but I can see why power users want 16/32 GB RAM.
I looked at System76 and Clevo laptops just to check my thinking. In both cases, the OEM sets the bottom configuration at 8 GB RAM and 240/250 GB drives. That suggests something, I guess. I 'm not sure what, exactly.
