Maybe a positive side effect will be OS and applications beginning to be more conscious of their RAM consumption. I am absolutely certain that due to the era of cheap memory storage, applications (browsers especially) have gotten insanely bloated.
Keep AI models out of your web browser and core operating system, and maybe 4GB can still cut it.
Do we really need more than 640k of RAM?
In short, I want Linux to work for me and other technically-minded enthusiasts […] Is this an elitist view? I don’t think so.
Is it elitist to gatekeep Linux for technically minded enthusiasts? Yes.
Especially when they end the article with “I for one hope it never does”. Definition of gatekeeping and toxic elitism.
Yes, but 20 billion parameters is too much for most GPUs, regardless of quantization. You would need at least 14GB, and even that’s unlikely without offloading major parts to the CPU and system RAM (which kills the token rate).
Do you have your wifi password saved in your KDE wallet?
There is an option to not save your wifi password using the wallet, otherwise you will be prompted at startup as soon as it attempts to connect to wifi.