Ubuntu Linux raises minimum system memory requirements by 50% — requirements bumped to 6GB of RAM, previously raised from 1GB to 4GB in 2018

can no longer say Linux is free

I bet your comment said something, so I upvoted it

Downvoted, textwall!

/j

The week after GDPR went into effect was amazing. Almost nobody was ready, so they just turned off all their ads and tracking for European IPs while they figured it out. Pages loaded pretty much instantly.

None if you use a good adblocker, like you should be doing.

They don't take significantly more RAM

Correct.

This is something people who call themselves tech nerds often don't understand, they only seem understand "bigger number better!". I have a vastly more enjoyable experience with a Mac than most Windows machines, (for many reasons, but most importantly for what you said).

Or webbrowser for that matter.

Gnome 3 was a fad anyway

You had McDonalds? That was just a farm in my day. Eee-eye-eee-eye-oh!

That dog is so dead by now

what the dog doin

Canonical is incompetent in general

See https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/24934365

Poverty = life choices is the most reddit I've seen in Lemmy in a long while

It's not the one thing that's gone to hell. rent is on it's way up all over the world, unemployment is way up, food costs are up. Ram, SSD, Gas, Electricity. Over the past year, most things have gotten more expensive. Evevrything has gone up except salaries.

Transport costs are about to skyrocket. That'll add several more percent on everything.

From an indie dev standpoint, maybe you're just insulated more than most.

You’re right. I’m a developer making great money and I dont want to pay these prices. I should have stayed in retail so it would never even be an option to consider.

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.)

I use arch myself but I don't think it's a good alternative top Ubuntu

Mint is based on Ubuntu.

Gemini protocol is pretty good and minimal. But very little usage unfortunately.

Funny enough, I installed Win11 on a friend's HP convertible laptop today.

A 2GHz i3 and 4GB RAM, and it was still entirely usable. Not powerful by any means, but a fine socials browser, YouTube viewer, and document writer.

I'd have preferred to put Debian on it, but it wasn't my call, so I did as requested.

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.

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

Last time i checked they still sell a RPi with less than 4GB of ram.

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.

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.

Feel free to stay on DOS gramps

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

I'm putting money on what we in the business technically refer to as "complete pants shitting"

Yeah, LMDE is pretty good. I used it for a couple of years during my rage-against-Ubuntu phase.

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).

Seriously, why do so many simple websites take more than and run worse that so many video games?

None on servers, gnome on the tablet

The difference was hundreds of MB, but when you're working with 8GB every bit counts. At that time KDE had an edge over Gnome. At some point the difference wasn't there anymore.

I was rationing what software I had open so as to avoid hitting swap because that's when there's a noticeable lag. Gnome was worse at recovering from that.

I remember that with Opera (before the switch to Chromium) I was able to open literally 100+ tabs on a machine with 1 gig of RAM. Sure, the web was simpler back then, but not by much.

The next Hannah Montana Linux

But one of the key points of Gnome is reduced functionality?

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

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.

Maybe but you do have to keep in mind it's older. It's an 8th gen intel i5.

It's not that linear. Some background services will cache more things in RAM if memory usage is low and release it if total usage goes above a threshold, for example.

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.

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.

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.

It snaps off your ram sticks

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.

Let's not get crazy