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?
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.
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.
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.
2GB is a lot
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.
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.
I mean the headline in your linked article literally calls it the ‘minimum system requirements’ not ‘reccomended’. Games have had two sets of requirements for decades, I don’t see why they couldn’t do the same. Regardless if you need to run Linux on older/less powerful hardware there’s much better choices than Ubuntu, which is designed to be as beginner-friendly as possible at the cost of performance and customizability as is, so in their case I guess it kinda makes sense to dumb it down.
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.
I’m not a fan, but thats extreme. The Ubuntu desktop will boot to the DE on half a gig of ram, and can open basic desktop apps with 1 or 2. Its the websites, containered apps, and more complex applications that Ubuntu is worried about UX disappointment from naive users (which is their segment). Windows 11 requires many times that just to get to a desktop and open a text file in notepad. They are not the same.
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.
My Tandy Sensation required 256MB and everything worked fine.
Shocked i got this far without someone blaming snaps
i blame snaps
Just use Debian
Or arch
I use arch myself but I don’t think it’s a good alternative top Ubuntu
or if you can’t get that to go (i had some hardware support issues) look to MX Linux or Linux Mint XFCE
Mint is based on Ubuntu.
yes but Linux Mint XFCE doesn’t use all the heavy weight sytems that mean Ubuntu desktop needs 6 GB ram. for that matter, Xubuntu will, too, but fuck canonical.
however, as much as i loathe canonical i’m not gonna attract people to more secure from bullshit solutions if i’m net willing to meet them where they are. i’d rather we all be on debian however if even i can’t get my laptop to work properly with it, i’m gonna direct some people to mint just to get them a little farther afield.
LMDE is based on Debian.
- Everything is a framework under a framework running on a pseudo virtual machine. 6 GB are just for the notepad and the mouse driver.
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.
Seriously, why do so many simple websites take more than and run worse that so many video games?
I thought part of the point was to have a website work more as an application: one update to a piece of information results in that information being near instantly updated across the site.
Then I looked into the angular stuff the UI people were working on and yeah… something like 10 (costly) requests for the same exact fucking JSON. They were talking about doing caching on the frontend to optimize it. What are we even doing?!
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.
What a bloat
Yeah, 6gb RAM is CRAZY! It’s almost like you’d have to buy a computer that’s at least 15 years old to get that!
What the hell is wrong with these people giving us free software for free and then having the audacity to expect us to pay more than $32 for a computer to run it!
THE NERVE!
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.
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!
I’m putting money on what we in the business technically refer to as “complete pants shitting”
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.
“HERE’S A NICKLE, KID. GET YOURSELF A BETTER COMPUTER.”
20 years ago when Scott Adams was still a moderately sane human.
8GB was barely enough 10 years ago. That’s when I switched to Arch+KDE. Then KDE started using more. memory.
More memory meaning? From 800Mb to 1GB? I’d say, for what plasma is, its ram usage is low.
agreed. KDE is pretty much the gold standard of the usability versus resource usage tradeoff, IMHO. From what I’ve seen: Websites/Web Browsers = worst offenders.
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.
If you want lightweight, KDE is not your best choice. LXQt and Xfce are actually intended for low resource usage.
I have a POS HP stream kicking around. Celeron and 2gb ram on it. It runs well with antix, I have used lxqt and xfce on it and been able to Google things and browse articles on the web, write word docs smoothly. I put kde plasma on it struggles now. Really it’s time to retire that thing, but I like to occasionally distro hop on it and see what will run on that bunk hardware. So far antiX has been by far snappiest on that laptop, but it’s not as pretty as KDE :c
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.
That dog is so dead by now
A dog dies twice. The first time is when its soul leaves its body, and the second time is when the meme of it is posted the last time.
what the dog doin
If you’re strugging to afford an 8GB RAM chip, you may want to reconsider some of your life choices. Even with current market prices.
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.
Poverty = life choices is the most reddit I’ve seen in Lemmy in a long while
No doubt the two aren’t always connected, but in the US at least, 8gb isnt exactly breaking the average American household’s bank. And if it is, yeah I’d argue they’re doing something wrong in their decisions. One could mow a few lawns and have enough cash to keep up with the modern requirements of an OS.
“No doubt they are always connected but I double down anyway”.
One could mow a few lawns and have enough cash to keep up with the modern requirements of an 0S.
Now that’s not just reddit, thats Fox News levels disconnect with reality.
Never thought I’d see “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” being used to defend inflated RAM prices, it’s getting wild over here
The median daily income in the USA is 70$ https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income
According to T Mobile the average phone bill per month in the USA is 156$.
https://www.t-mobile.com/dialed-in/wireless/average-phone-bill-per-month
On newegg you can buy 8TV ram for $15.76 https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=RAM+8gb&Submit=ENE&pageTitle=RAM+8gb&Order=1
So yes, he’s fucking right. Most people in the USA can afford 8GB RAM and if they cannot, they should consider looking into their expenditures.
I’m speaking American since you’re quoting Fox News… Because it seems you’re so self aware you forgot other countries exist. But that’s just you’re average Lemmy user “I’m more woke than you” kind of bullshit.
Fucking hell you people are so tiring. Nobody supports anything going against its own world view. You make me cringe so fucking much.
WTF you gonna do with PC3 ram, you have a good supply of ancient hardware or something?
Run ubuntu.
Average phone bill per month is 156$? Wtf do u have to do to get such a high phone bill lol
that’s probably per ‘household’ not ‘per line’ or ‘per person’.
Dont ask me idk
I’m quoting Fox because the other mentioned US. Blame them for US centrism, but then please update your incomes and costs to somewhere like Somalia, or even Greece. But that would be too woke or something?
Even if most people can, that doesn’t mean that if you can’t is because of bad decisions. That means being homeless is because of bad decisions. That means that those already on debt for medical issues made a bad decision.
For a lot of people spending those 16 dollars on RAM is the bad decision.
BTW, median income is absurd. You can have income and still spend on living expenses more than you earn. Now please tell me people needs to move to rural Ohio to maw grass to buy 8 gigs of RAM.
Edit: somehow I’ve struck a nerve with people from programing.dev who created the account on the same day, never commented anything and saw my comment within a few minutes of one another. I think I’ve struck a nerve :)
What a fucking dumb hill to die on when factually proven wrong.
JFC. Zero self awareness here. Peak fucking American.
Most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Surviving off creditcards and buy now pay later.
Something tells me you don’t exactly have your finger on the pulse of “average” America.
Fuck out of here with this bullshit
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.
