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.
this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2026
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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
Funny enough, I installed Win11 on a friend's HP convertible laptop today.
A 2GHz i3 and 4GB RAM, and it was still entirely usable. Not powerful by any means, but a fine socials browser, YouTube viewer, and document writer.
I'd have preferred to put Debian on it, but it wasn't my call, so I did as requested.
A 2GHz i3
Strangely, that really does not narrow down which processor it is to me.
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No no it doesn't. It's spec acknowledges that in addition to your OS you also run applications.
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I just checked Woot.com and you can get a refurbished Thinkpad with 16gb of RAM for $230. And there's a scratch and dent Dell netbook with 8gb of RAM for $60.
Meanwhile on my raspberrypi 4 running Ubuntu server:
And my tablet running stock Ubuntu:
Why is Ubuntu server even a thing? Desktop and server have quite the opposite requirements.
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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.
Assuming around USD $220 for a 16GB kit of DDR5, it now costs $27.50 more to run Ubuntu.
I'm ok with this - lubuntu has my back.
Labubuntu
The next Hannah Montana Linux
My first Linux distro, on account of 2GB of RAM.
Really unfortunate seeing GNOME is part of the problem here. Linux desktop environments shouldn't need to be tied to large RAM requirements, never mind increasing ones, for basic functionality. For example, the Start menu key was introduced by Microsoft in Windows 95, but this toggle still isn't available in most "light" desktop environments like XFCE.
The MacBook Neo, of all things, is chomping at the heels of the idea that pretty, feature-rich OSes need a lot of hardware to function.
I found a lot of flawed measurements which ended up measuring different things. This seems like a fairly respectable measurement even for being a few years old
https://itvision.altervista.org/linux-desktop-environments-system-usage.html
Simple environments like xfce or mate under X11 are around 600 MB. Gnome X 1300MB Gnome Wayland 1400. Seems pretty clear that gnome is a significant factor in the increase on the other hand most machines now come with 8-16
But one of the key points of Gnome is reduced functionality?
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