Plus, a modern OS can sensibly manage it's own memory. If a lot of your memory is buffered, the OS will deal with it. If it's all taken, well, no additional app

Plus, a modern OS can sensibly manage it's own memory. If a lot of your memory is buffered, the OS will deal with it. If it's all taken, well, no additional application is going to help you with that. I think this panic started with Windows Vista where there was no distinction between actually used memory and memory used for caches and buffers. Hence the complaints about how Vista was so inefficient, it didn't have enough memory even when freshly launched with no apps open.