You can really download more ram if you use cloud storage as swap

Many people who don’t know what they’re talking about in this thread. No, used memory does not include cached memory. You can confirm this trivially by running free -m and adding up the numbers (used + cached + free = total). Used memory can not be reclaimed until the process holding it frees it or dies. Not all cached memory can be reclaimed either, which is why the kernel reports an estimate of available memory. That’s the number that really matters, because aside from some edges cases that’s the number that determines whether you’re out of memory or not.

Anyway the fact that you can’t run Linux with 16GB is weird and indicates that some software you are using has a RAM leak (a Firefox extension perhaps?). Firefox will use memory if it’s there but it’s designed to cope with low memory as well, it just unloads tabs quicker so you have to reload often. There are also extensions that make tab unloading more aggressive, maybe that would help - especially if there’s memory pressure from other processes too.

https://www.linuxatemyram.com/

Electron apps are bullshit though.

every chat app might use ~1GB because most of them are electron apps, which all spawn their own instance of chromium

It’s already been explained elsewhere, but the cache can be free, as needed - that’s how linux works.
There’s 57+ GB available ram, yet.

Solution: if you only have 4GB ram, nothing can use more than 4GB

Hey, unused memory is wasted memory