I’m ok with this - lubuntu has my back.
Labubuntu
The next Hannah Montana Linux
Fun thing, I just booted up an old computer. Started right up. It had Ubuntu 11.10 on it.
Now, I obviously didn’t connect the thing to the Internet. Updates would have probably failed hard. Not because it’s missing over a decade of updates so there might be some complications on that front, but because it’s a Pentium III with Definitely Not Even a Gigabyte of memory. (Oh and a Nvidia GeForce 2 MX. I’m pretty sure that’s not supported by… any driver any more.)
Clone the hard drive and see what happens!
IN THIS ECONOMY???
Worst timing for sure
can no longer say Linux is free
This is not Linux, this is Ubuntu, you can run Linux on the map on the back of a cereal box.
was trying to reference the minimum specs meme for Linux that goes like “Linux: memory (optional)”
I know, right? Read the room!
That’s a short and spiffy summation of the article.
I don’t immediately hate it. It’s been a while since any laptops/prebuilds shipped with less than 8 GB, and there’s distros out there far better suited to running on low power or legacy hardware.
Yeah my old ass laptop as 16GB so this is a non issue.
My older-ass laptop has 2GB, so it’s kind of an issue for me.
(But I never attempted to put Ubuntu on that in the first place. It’s running a much older, purpose-built version of Linux.)
Ubuntu is the Windows 11 of Linux distros.
I’d say it’s worse than Win 11 as a desktop distro
Let’s not get crazy
Shocked i got this far without someone blaming snaps
i blame snaps
Meanwhile on my raspberrypi 4 running Ubuntu server:

And my tablet running stock Ubuntu:

Why not just debian if its a server?
Which desktop environments are you using on those systems?
What a bloat
Yeah, 6gb RAM is CRAZY! It’s almost like you’d have to buy a computer that’s at least 15 years old to get that!
What the hell is wrong with these people giving us free software for free and then having the audacity to expect us to pay more than $32 for a computer to run it!
THE NERVE!
Many people have 8 and 8 is going to be more popular again because of ai.
Only having 2gbs leftover to run everything isn’t great.
So basically the system requirements of Chrome.
But how will I run it on my 32bit laptop now? /s
sorta funny as 16 is starting to feel cramped but I like headroom.
“Starting to”? 16GB is just a few tabs open for long enough.
Well thats the thing. For a tech person and compared to my peers I use pretty minimal stats. I only started feeling constrained by 8 like late teens and I was fine with 4 in the aughts. I guess my own personal ram usage level has been doubling although the aughts were insane. Having a 1 gig drive was a big deal coming into them and we had ram measured in kilobytes in a lot of our hosts. The pace of tech expansion in the first decade of the millenium is multiples of what we see after.
Yeah that’s fair. My RAM usage is through the roof lately, but it pretty clearly happened when I switched to a multimonitor setup. I’m much more likely to have a lot of stuff in the background now because it’s easier to have a lot open at the same time in the practical sense.
But I was lucky enough to grab a 64GB kit before prices went into the sky. Believe it or not, I was regularly up against the limit when I had 32GB.
I haven’t run 16GB RAM SINCE MY 2012 Win8/Ubuntu PC. 3rd gen i7 w DDR3 1600MHz lol.
Now on 64GB 5600MHz and 12th gen i9. No upgrades any time soon.
Assuming around USD $220 for a 16GB kit of DDR5, it now costs $27.50 more to run Ubuntu.
“HERE’S A NICKLE, KID. GET YOURSELF A BETTER COMPUTER.”

20 years ago when Scott Adams was still a moderately sane human.
Use Debian if you want a system like Ubuntu that isn’t full of Canonical’s corporate shit. Ubuntu is based on Debian.
Would lmde be as good?
Honestly, dont take anyones recommendation. It takes 10 minutes to create a bootable USB for a Linux distro once you get the hang of it. Try a handful of different “easy” distros and desktops on a Saturday morning and pick one that seems to work well on your computer and that you find you like. What you find intuitive isnt necessarily good for another, etc. A little time invested in shopping will pay off later (which is true for a lot of things).
Yeah, LMDE is pretty good. I used it for a couple of years during my rage-against-Ubuntu phase.
This doesn’t seem so bad, though. 2 GB more in about 10 years is pretty reasonable in terms of an increase.
It’s not like they doubled it.
no it is not reasonable. What the hell do they need an extra 2gb for? What the hell is the operating system taking up that much resources for?
My first pc needed 4MiB of ram for the os. Why does this need 1536x as much to provide… not much else tbh?
Ubuntu is the Windows of Linux.
It’s getting more and more bloated with unnecessary and unwanted things, because of canonicals bad management decisions. They seemingly care more about “business” rather than users.
I’m not a fan, but thats extreme. The Ubuntu desktop will boot to the DE on half a gig of ram, and can open basic desktop apps with 1 or 2. Its the websites, containered apps, and more complex applications that Ubuntu is worried about UX disappointment from naive users (which is their segment). Windows 11 requires many times that just to get to a desktop and open a text file in notepad. They are not the same.
According to the article linked in the article, it’s not that the operating system itself is more demanding, but more that the DE, and Browsers/Websites are more demanding now.
It feels like that Canonical basically needs to do the games thing of having a set of minimum specs for Ubuntu to run at all, and a recommend specs for Ubuntu to run well. Canonically basically bumped up the latter, but it’s being taken as the former.
I mean the headline in your linked article literally calls it the ‘minimum system requirements’ not ‘reccomended’. Games have had two sets of requirements for decades, I don’t see why they couldn’t do the same. Regardless if you need to run Linux on older/less powerful hardware there’s much better choices than Ubuntu, which is designed to be as beginner-friendly as possible at the cost of performance and customizability as is, so in their case I guess it kinda makes sense to dumb it down.
It seems to imply that software has gotten way worse in the last 10 years.
All of the default software that comes with the Ubuntu desktop will run reasonably well with 2Gb. Its the websites and electon apps (i.e., websites) that will make it swap. That and modern users that want to keep dozens of programs or websites open -which users 10 or 20 years ago may have known not to do.
Worse is relative, a proportion of the requirement increase will be due to worse code, but much more will be for features to make the software more accessible to more people, and adding features without needing to remove old ones, neither of which are a bad thing, otherwise everything would be a command line tool that removes options every few months and only has one way to use it
2GB is a lot













