Yeah, the minimal memory usage is actually more appealing to me than the speed. The latter is much more important in reality though, as more RAM can always trivially be thrown at a problem.
I'm rather unimpressed by a linear reduction in memory consumption. Mostly because its linear, and its "easy" to scale linearly (its called going and buying more RAM!)
Everyone complains that it is bloated and slow, but I think a lot of people run it with too little memory. I always change the default settings to give it 2g of memory and it always runs fast. Some people think that's ridiculous, but given I spend 70% of my time in that environment, I'm more than happy to have it use that much memory.
I'm occasionally tempted to add RAM, but every year my OS and applications get more memory-efficient so I have less of an excuse to spend any money on that. I've got 16GB and it's getting more sufficient all the time! The latest compiler upgrades make it twice as fast as last year, on the same hardware. Life is pretty good.
(Avoiding hardware upgrades isn't all peaches and cream. My graphics cards are getting less acceptable all the time, and I'll probably need to upgrade this year.)
I don't use Chrome or Slack or any of those others. The easiest way to use less memory is to not run programs which require a bunch of it. People who drive Ferraris don't complain about their fuel economy.
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