IN THIS ECONOMY????

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.

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.

Great move in these times where RAM is cheap and widely available

I don't immediately hate it. It's been a while since any laptops/prebuilds shipped with less than 8 GB, and there's distros out there far better suited to running on low power or legacy hardware.

"HERE'S A NICKLE, KID. GET YOURSELF A BETTER COMPUTER."

Just use Debian

Wow, it needs more RAM than Windows!

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-specifications

Me with 16 GB on my computer

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

That's pretty much what a browser needs these days.

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.

Use Debian if you want a system like Ubuntu that isn't full of Canonical's corporate shit. Ubuntu is based on Debian.

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.)

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.

Ubuntu is the Windows 11 of Linux distros.

Shocked i got this far without someone blaming snaps

2026. Everything is a framework under a framework running on a pseudo virtual machine. 6 GB are just for the notepad and the mouse driver.

8GB was barely enough 10 years ago. That's when I switched to Arch+KDE. Then KDE started using more. memory.

Meanwhile on my raspberrypi 4 running Ubuntu server:

And my tablet running stock Ubuntu:

In post PC ownership cyberpunk dystopia well all be running slack

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?