Earlier quoted context omitted.
Buy why that much? The first computer I bought had 192MB of RAM and I ran a 1600x1200 desktop with 24-bit color. When Windows 2000 came out, all of the transparency effects ran great. Office worked fine, Visual Studio, 1024x768 gaming (I know that’s quite a step down from 1080p). What has changed? Why do I need 10x the RAM to open a handful of terminals and a text editor?
Higher res icons probably add a couple hundred megs alone
But raw imagery is one of the few cases where you can legitimately require large amounts of RAM because of the squaring nature of area. You only need that raw state in a limited number of situations where you are manipulating the data though. If you are dealing with images without descending to pixels then there's pretty much no reason to keep it all floating around in that form, You generally don't have more than a hundred icons onscreen, and once you start fetching data from the slowest RAM in your machine you get pretty decent speed gains from using decompression than trying to move the uncompressed form around.