Totally overkill. I thought I would be running lots of containers and virtual machines, but really never seem to use more than 16gb total. And I didn’t set up a swap partition, neither.
Thank you, I wondered. I keep thinking I need to upgrade to 32GB from 16 but have get to run into a need other than the prices are pretty cheap these days
I'm not that sure about 16gb for gaming nowadays. Games are starting to explode in ram and vram usage.
With windows on the side and plenty of other apps in the background, I was pretty close to the limit while running a vm with 16gb of memory on a 32gb ram setup, while running warframe (The game was using 5-5.5gb of memory).
You don't really need to upgrade. But for a new pc, 32gb is advised for anything gaming.
For other things like content creation or work with the computer other than basic computing, I don't really know. It would change depending on what someone needs to so with the computer.
I haven't run into issues on my gaming rig with 16. If I was building new I'd get 32 for sure. But my old 10700k and 4090 seem to do just fine on 16. Even when running unoptimized emulation like early days with ToTK I hardly used more than 12.
I feel those days are ending soon though and will need more in the next year or so.
You should always use a swap partition for linux, even if you have more than "enough" memory. It just works better for a very very tiny loss of diskspace.
That's cool, what do you use your VMs for? We have them setup at work too split resources but I can't think of a personal reason to use a virtual machine.