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.
this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2026
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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.
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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.
2GB is a lot
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.
Regardless of the OS, if you're using the computer for anything productive, the application software, not the OS, will eat the majority of the RAM anyway. If you're looking at the minimum requirements, chances are you're not looking to do anything besides browsing the web with 5 tabs open.
It sucks though, I agree - software should get more efficient over time, just like hardware does. Out of curiosity, do we have anything more specific, i.e. how they tested that, what apps were running and so on? Or maybe they now deem that more things should be running?
Your example goes far beyond 4 GB of ram lol
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.
Which is exactly what Ubuntu is doing. The desktop and even most native desktop applications that come with it will run just fine with 1 or 2GB of ram. If you used it like a 90s computer for 90s computer tasks, it will work fine.
In practice, however, users will open a web browser to some “modern” websites or a couple electron apps and have a very bad experience.
My Tandy Sensation required 256MB and everything worked fine.
Me with 16 GB on my computer
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
That's not an argument for me, because less RAM usage by the operating system leaves you with more resources left for your applications and programms.
I wonder how much of this is just modern web apps... even running without a containerized distro and a leaner DE - I still have +90% of my RAM taken up by websites.
Modern UI development is such fucking shit. I have no idea why they went with all of these heavyweight shit frameworks.
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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.
Please everyone read or at least skim articles before posting.
NEVER!
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"HERE'S A NICKLE, KID. GET YOURSELF A BETTER COMPUTER."
20 years ago when Scott Adams was still a moderately sane human.
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.)
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- Everything is a framework under a framework running on a pseudo virtual machine. 6 GB are just for the notepad and the mouse driver.
That's pretty much what a browser needs these days.
In this economy?
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.
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