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.
But that requires actually READING 😖 /j
Downvoted, textwall!
/j
Web browsing is the real murder here… and i dont want to know how much memory is solely spent on ads
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.
But that’s not honest.
Ubuntu’s default browser, and other apps, are snap-based. They take significantly more resourced than their Debian counterparts.
They don’t take significantly more RAM
If a snap is bundled with it’s own dependencies (the point of snap), those dependency libraries are not loaded into shared memory. Multiple apps that would typically share a loaded dependency must now each load them into RAM.
latest Gnome desktop, modern web browsers, and typical multitasking workflows
so use a lighter-weight de (xfce, lxqt, budgie), and don’t go crazy with brower tabs or open applications, and you’ll be ok… like you’re probably already doing now if you’ve got a ‘marginal’ pc.
Correct.
Might as well bump it to 64 GB and an LLM chip since in 5 years’ time people might like Copilot & Friends spying a bit less on them.
I totally get it but with the current rampocalypse I’d delay it just for the optics alone
Great move in these times where RAM is cheap and widely available
Canonical has never been accused of being able to read the room.
Canonical is incompetent in general
I mean they didn’t go “well, let’s just use 2GB more RAM now”. They looked at the pre-release, and judged that for a good experience you should have 6GB. Chances are that resource consumption of 25.10 hasn’t been very different in practice.
In this economy?
So basically the system requirements of Chrome.
Just use Debian
Or arch
I use arch myself but I don’t think it’s a good alternative top Ubuntu
That’s pretty much what a browser needs these days.
Reject modernity. Embrace lynx browser from terminal.
Gemini protocol is pretty good and minimal. But very little usage unfortunately.
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!
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.
It seems to imply that software has gotten way worse in the last 10 years.
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
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?
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.
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.
2GB is a lot
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.
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?
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.
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.
It sucks though, I agree - software should get more efficient over time, just like hardware does.
It generally does, for any given computing task, but the problem is that generally software adds more features over time, not least of which is supporting new hardware that hits the ecosystem.
In post PC ownership cyberpunk dystopia well all be running slack
I would be but I misplaced the “a1” disk.
My Tandy Sensation required 256MB and everything worked fine.
How will this affect Linux Mint, and should I make my move to Linux Mint: Debian Edition?
A lot (most) of it depends on the desktop environment you use. If you look for idle RAM usage compared by desktop environment you will see how drastic it is.
This kinda thing https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/linux-des-resource-usage-compared/70060
it won’t. ubuntu’s announcement pertains to the extra demands of gnome, their flagship release, and it’s default configuration.
mint doesn’t ship a gnome spin, and cinnamon, mate and xfce are lighter-weight… and mint is not dependent upon snaps, nor is it even configured oob with snap support enabled.
