this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2026
69 points (88.8% liked)
Technology
83342 readers
3082 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No-one commenting seems to have read the article. They are raising the recommended specs due to desktop software and web sites being more resource intensive.
Edit: to add, I would not recommend 6GB RAM for desktop use to anyone. I would say the very minimum is 8GB nowadays.
Agreed. It's an uphill optimization battle. We're now in a world where you need 6GB RAM to chat on Discord while scrolling Facebook.
Ubuntu and its apps (particularly Firefox) are incredibly efficient and respects your hardware resources. I can write a web page with a 5MB RAM footprint. It's when you open the New York Times that your swapfile gets face-slapped.
Funnily enough, an Ubuntu server will run on a half-eaten potato. I've got 16GB in mine, and I'm running servers for LAMP (Nextcloud and Wordpress), NTP, Samba, Mail, Jellyfin, tor, XMPP, CUPS and a few other things. It typically uses around 2GB at idle.
Why did you call them LAMP?
Linux Apache MySQL PHP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAMP_%28software_bundle%29
See also WAMP and MAMP. For windows and macOS
Novice here, is there a viewer mode that doesn't load all that bullshit
Yes, firefox android has a reading mode. Jnsure what it loads but it rules. Does not work on all pages but many benefit from it
How big could a websit… oh. Oh my.
The desktop software in question is GNOME, which is an integral part of the OS... So it's definitely true that part of the bloat is because the software running the OS itself is now using more RAM.
I had to check. I do have 8GB, wohoo!
Depends on what you're doing. If you're okay with very limited Web use, even 2GB is viable (or was about a year ago when I retired that machine). More normal levels of Web use, you're going to need more RAM. Not sure about GPU-constrained loads like 3D modeling, as I never tried them on that machine. But other than those and some games, nothing on Linux should require even 8GB. Server systems can make do with even less.
Agreed.