Memory usage is getting frustrating for me, as whether I use 64gb of ram, or 128gb, I still tend to exhaust memory on my system.  My laptop currently has 64gb, and started freaking out this morning, to find I was hitting oom's again with browsing and some general use as wake up.

Trying to figure out with htop what is using all my memory, firefox was a big consumer, using ~25gb of ram once killed.  Yeah, it's like that.  Chrome was typically worse.  I use 6 profiles, as I have to for different companies I consult for, mostly due to different gsuite accounts and different o365 accounts that will not play nice in a same profile.  Same for Chrome.  I figure I can't be the only person that does this, perhaps so, but the memory utilization with with only a few tabs on each is astounding.

I tend to run several VM's at a time, a full instance of windoze10 or two with 4-8gb of ram work fine.

I use pluma text editor a lot as the gedit fork from mint, which I'll find uses 3-4gb of memory with a few dozen text files open.  Of text.  Doesn't seem to be worth a few gig of ram.

Libreoffice itself tends to use 3-4gb of memory keeping a dozen or two files open, which again flipping between several customers, I tend to work on, review, etc constantly.

Even on boot, kde tends to use ~3.5gb of memory, and after running for a few week or two, with everything else killed, will start consuming ~9gb with nothing else running.  No idea where it goes.

My question is how the heck do others run linux with only 4-8gb of ram on a "normal" system?  Most linux users are likely IT professionals like myself, just curious what the heck I'm doing wrong.

-mb