Not the best timing due to the RAMpocalypse, but there are leaner distros like Lubuntu available if you need them.
  • Black616Angel@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    4 hours

    Please everyone read or at least skim articles before posting. The article literally says, that it’s “an honest bump” to allow typical usage like web browsing and multitasking.

    Ubuntu experts at OMG Ubuntu characterize the latest revision in RAM specs as “an honesty bump.” In other words, the core OS isn’t really more demanding on system resources this time around, but Canonical recognizes that with the latest Gnome desktop, modern web browsers, and typical multitasking workflows, users should look at a minimum of 6GB of RAM.

  • fartsparkles@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4 hours

    They’re raising it because of RAM needs of browsers and GNOME.

    If you’re a shell nerd like me, you’ll still be fine running it on a potato.

    • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
      4 hours

      It’s an illuminating experience to go to a store with Apple computers with 8GB of RAM on display, and browse to a RAM-heavy unoptimized website like YouTube or even Reddit now.

      Open a few tabs.
      Open a dozen.
      You’d be surprised what a decently coded OS can pull off without compromising on the visuals.

  • circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    2 hours

    Assuming around USD $220 for a 16GB kit of DDR5, it now costs $27.50 more to run Ubuntu.

  • IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    6 hours

    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.

      • OwOarchist@pawb.socialEnglish
        4 hours

        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.)

  • northernlights@lemmy.todayEnglish
    3 hours

    Meanwhile on my raspberrypi 4 running Ubuntu server:

    screenshot showing 800M RAM usage

    And my tablet running stock Ubuntu:

    screenshot showing 2.3G RAM usage

    • michaelmrose@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1 hour

      No no it doesn’t. It’s spec acknowledges that in addition to your OS you also run applications.

    • CaptDust@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      5 hours

      Wow those min specs are pure bullshit. Sure you can run the OS - oh, did you want to do anything else with your PC? Good luck

      • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
        3 hours

        Note the spec increase in Ubuntu is partially attributed to GNOME, which is also part of just running the OS before you even open anything.

    • mogoh@lemmy.mlEnglish
      6 hours

      OK, but oppose to Windows, you can run Ubuntu 24 until 2029. I don’t think many will use a 4 GB notebook (as a notebook and not as a Debian server) beyond that time.

      • OwOarchist@pawb.socialEnglish
        4 hours

        I’m using my 2016 Chromebook with 2GB until it literally dies. (Sucker has 16+ hours of battery life. Pretty nice, actually!)

        • chocrates@piefed.worldEnglish
          3 hours

          Ubuntu (at least the default wm) runs like shit on rpi. I use Ubuntu everywhere but for small machines I typically find something specific for it.

          • atomicbocks@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            4 minutes

            Sure, but my point was more they still currently sell devices with less than 4GB of RAM so it seems reasonable to foresee people still using them in 2 1/2 years.

    • mrnobody@reddthat.comEnglish
      1 hour

      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.

      • HubertManne@piefed.socialEnglish
        2 hours

        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.

  • TrackinDaKraken@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5 hours

    When I built my current rig a few years back (when I still used Windows and Photoshop), I said, “RAM is cheap enough, and more is better, but don’t go overboard.”

    That’s how I ended up with 64GB of RAM.

  • OwOarchist@pawb.socialEnglish
    4 hours

    Why would 2026 Ubuntu need 6x the RAM that 2018 Ubuntu needs?

    Just how much bloat are they bloating, here?

    • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      2 hours

      Because websites and browsers have gotten way more bloated. If you don’t need a web browser, you can get by with a lot less RAM.

      • squaresinger@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1 hour

        And the default DE is a JS app that runs in a webview. You know, the same tech stack we make fun of the Win11 start menu for, but for the whole DE.

    • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4 hours

      They’re basically saying “Our software doesn’t need more RAM, but most of what you run on it does, so this is a more realistic expectation for what will make for a good experience.”

  • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
    4 hours

    Really unfortunate seeing GNOME is part of the problem here. Linux desktop environments shouldn’t need to be tied to large RAM requirements, never mind increasing ones, for basic functionality. For example, the Start menu key was introduced by Microsoft in Windows 95, but this toggle still isn’t available in most “light” desktop environments like XFCE.

    The MacBook Neo, of all things, is chomping at the heels of the idea that pretty, feature-rich OSes need a lot of hardware to function.

    • Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      4 hours

      If you don’t like GNOME, Ubuntu officially supports other, less resource-intensive DEs, like Lubuntu, Kubuntu or Xubuntu

      • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
        3 hours

        I would prefer something that’s light without compromising on things that Microsoft figured out in the 90s and 2000s, and things that modern Apple computers can pull off now.

        Apparently GNOME in particular is having a rough time in general, if other articles from the same website omgubuntu are an indicator, but this seems to be a wider trend in desktop environments

        • squaresinger@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1 hour

          Gnome is Javascript that runs in a webview. It’s the same technology stack that we make fun of with the Win11 start menu.

          It’s shit technology. No wonder it requires so much RAM.

          • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
            42 minutes

            For Macs with 8GB RAM? Yes.

            For Windows? It’s way worse in my experience, even with debloat scripts, without opening a single thing.

    • poke@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4 hours

      The macbook Neo is a pretty powerful laptop, I wouldn’t say its a champion of limited computation software success.

      • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
        3 hours

        The specs are pretty good, but it’s still only eight gigabytes of RAM total, and a phone processor, and seems optimized for comfort (cool case temperatures) over performance.

  • GutterRat42@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6 hours

    How will this affect Linux Mint, and should I make my move to Linux Mint: Debian Edition?

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    6 hours

    I mean, it’s probably a good idea to have them higher, given that if someone wants to use it with some typical out-of-the-box desktop settings, that’s not unreasonable, but while I haven’t looked at the Ubuntu installer for a while, I strongly suspect that it permits you to do a minimal install, and that all the software in the Debian family is also there, so you can do a lightweight desktop based on Ubuntu.

    My current desktop environment has sway, blueman-applet, waybar, and swaync-client running. I’m sure that you could replicate the same thing on an Ubuntu box. Sway is the big one there, at an RSS of 189MB (mostly 148MB of which is shared, probably essentially all use of shared libraries). That’s the basic “desktop graphical environment” memory cost.

    I use foot as a terminal (not in daemon mode, which would shrink memory further, though be less-amenable to use of multiple cores). That presently has 40 MB RSS, 33 of which are shared. It’s running tmux, at 16MB RSS, 4 of which are shared. GNU screen, which I’ve also used and could get by on, would be lighter, but it has an annoying patch that causes it to take a bit before terminating.

    Almost the only other graphical app I ever have active is Firefox, which is presently at an RSS of 887.1, of which 315MB is shared. That can change, based on what Firefox has open, but I think that use of a web browser is pretty much the norm everwhere, and if anything, the Firefox family is probably on the lighter side in 2026 compared to the main alternative of the Chrome family.

    I’m pretty sure that one could run that same setup pretty comfortably on a computer from the late 1990s, especially if you have SSD swap available to handle any spikes in memory usage. Firefox would feel sluggish, but if you’re talking memory usage…shrugs I’ve used an i3/Xorg-based variant of that on an eeePC that had 2GB of memory that I used mostly as a web-browser plus terminal thin client to a “real machine” to see if I could, did that for an extended period of time. Browser could feel sluggish on some websites, but other than that…shrugs.

    Now, if you want to be, I don’t know, playing some big 3D video game, then that is going to crank up the requirements on hardware. But that’s going to be imposed by the game. It’s not overhead from your basic graphical environment.

    I’d also be pretty confident that you could replicate that setup using the same packages on any Debian-family system, and probably on pretty much any major Linux distro with a bit of tweaking to the installed packages.

    • OwOarchist@pawb.socialEnglish
      4 hours

      so you can do a lightweight desktop based on Ubuntu.

      Honestly, I suspect the main issue here is Gnome.

      Despite their insistence on ‘simplicity’ and ‘elegance’, Gnome is by far the most resource-hungry DE that exists in the Linux ecosystem.

      That, and maybe snap packages. It can’t be good for RAM usage to have every app trying to load its own independent system of dependencies. That’s got to lead to a lot of duplication in dependencies loaded into RAM.

      • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
        3 hours

        Someone else in another comment linked to a memory comparison between desktop environments, and there KDE Plasma used the most memory, with GNOME in second place, but I think that the broader point here is that on Windows, you have one basic graphical shell that basically all desktop users are expected to have running. It’s not completely impossible to hack up a Windows environment to avoid doing so, but it’s a highly nonstandard configuration, and stuff is going to break.

        Linux has a much broader range of options available, and those are first-class citizens. Some of them are considerably lighter on resource usage than others.

        A lot of users aren’t going to cobble together their own ideal environment the way I do, but there are “presets” of packages that are aimed specifically at being light on resource usage. XFCE has historically been one example; they were slow to move to Wayland, but it looks like they’re doing it now. One doesn’t have the sort of “the OS vendor is giving you one monolithic blob that you need to run” the way you do on Windows.