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Ubuntu quietly raises its minimum system requirements
(www.omgubuntu.co.uk)
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this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2026
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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
How big could a websit… oh. Oh my.
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.
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.
Agreed.