IN THIS ECONOMY????
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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!
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.
I'm concerned about in-system bloat because I read the linked article.
Rather, it’s more of an honesty bump. Components that make up the distro – the GNOME desktop and extensions, modern web browsers (and the sites we load in them) and the kinds of apps we use (and keep running) whilst multitasking are more demanding.
The desktop itself isn't the only reason that you need more RAM, but it's definitely one of them.
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.
It's an illuminating experience to go to a store with Apple computers with 8GB of RAM on display, and browse to a RAM-heavy unoptimized website like YouTube or even Reddit now.
Open a few tabs.
Open a dozen.
You'd be surprised what a decently coded OS can pull off without compromising on the visuals.

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.
In this economy?
So basically the system requirements of Chrome.
"HERE'S A NICKLE, KID. GET YOURSELF A BETTER COMPUTER."

20 years ago when Scott Adams was still a moderately sane human.
Wow, it needs more RAM than Windows!
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-specifications
Wow those min specs are pure bullshit. Sure you can run the OS - oh, did you want to do anything else with your PC? Good luck
That's pretty much what a browser needs these days.
Use Debian if you want a system like Ubuntu that isn't full of Canonical's corporate shit. Ubuntu is based on Debian.
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.
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.
Modern UI development is such fucking shit. I have no idea why they went with all of these heavyweight shit frameworks.
- Everything is a framework under a framework running on a pseudo virtual machine. 6 GB are just for the notepad and the mouse driver.
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.
Meanwhile on my raspberrypi 4 running Ubuntu server:

And my tablet running stock Ubuntu:

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.
