sorta funny as 16 is starting to feel cramped but I like headroom.
this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2026
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I haven't run 16GB RAM SINCE MY 2012 Win8/Ubuntu PC. 3rd gen i7 w DDR3 1600MHz lol.
Now on 64GB 5600MHz and 12th gen i9. No upgrades any time soon.
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How will this affect Linux Mint, and should I make my move to Linux Mint: Debian Edition?
It doesn't. If you're doing anything in a web browser you're going to need that much RAM for a reasonable experience no matter what DE you're using. Ubuntu are just trying to set more realistic expectations.
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Why would 2026 Ubuntu need 6x the RAM that 2018 Ubuntu needs?
Just how much bloat are they bloating, here?
Snaps need that to be snappy.
It snaps off your ram sticks
They use a lot more disk do they actually use meaningfully more ram? Other than obviously inherently bloated web tech stuff?
I don't think so, but to be fair, I'm not using Ubuntu so I can't tell you first-hand
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But how will I run it on my 32bit laptop now? /s
But I demand my vibe coded AI slop programs run at half the speed of 30 year old software!
I mean, it's probably a good idea to have them higher, given that if someone wants to use it with some typical out-of-the-box desktop settings, that's not unreasonable, but while I haven't looked at the Ubuntu installer for a while, I strongly suspect that it permits you to do a minimal install, and that all the software in the Debian family is also there, so you can do a lightweight desktop based on Ubuntu.
My current desktop environment has sway, blueman-applet, waybar, and swaync-client running. I'm sure that you could replicate the same thing on an Ubuntu box. Sway is the big one there, at an RSS of 189MB (mostly 148MB of which is shared, probably essentially all use of shared libraries). That's the basic "desktop graphical environment" memory cost.
I use foot as a terminal (not in daemon mode, which would shrink memory further, though be less-amenable to use of multiple cores). That presently has 40 MB RSS, 33 of which are shared. It's running tmux, at 16MB RSS, 4 of which are shared. GNU screen, which I've also used and could get by on, would be lighter, but it has an annoying patch that causes it to take a bit before terminating.
Almost the only other graphical app I ever have active is Firefox, which is presently at an RSS of 887.1, of which 315MB is shared. That can change, based on what Firefox has open, but I think that use of a web browser is pretty much the norm everwhere, and if anything, the Firefox family is probably on the lighter side in 2026 compared to the main alternative of the Chrome family.
I'm pretty sure that one could run that same setup pretty comfortably on a computer from the late 1990s, especially if you have SSD swap available to handle any spikes in memory usage. Firefox would feel sluggish, but if you're talking memory usage...shrugs I've used an i3/Xorg-based variant of that on an eeePC that had 2GB of memory that I used mostly as a web-browser plus terminal thin client to a "real machine" to see if I could, did that for an extended period of time. Browser could feel sluggish on some websites, but other than that...shrugs.
Now, if you want to be, I don't know, playing some big 3D video game, then that is going to crank up the requirements on hardware. But that's going to be imposed by the game. It's not overhead from your basic graphical environment.
I'd also be pretty confident that you could replicate that setup using the same packages on any Debian-family system, and probably on pretty much any major Linux distro with a bit of tweaking to the installed packages.
so you can do a lightweight desktop based on Ubuntu.
Honestly, I suspect the main issue here is Gnome.
Despite their insistence on 'simplicity' and 'elegance', Gnome is by far the most resource-hungry DE that exists in the Linux ecosystem.
That, and maybe snap packages. It can't be good for RAM usage to have every app trying to load its own independent system of dependencies. That's got to lead to a lot of duplication in dependencies loaded into RAM.
Someone else in another comment linked to a memory comparison between desktop environments, and there KDE Plasma used the most memory, with GNOME in second place, but I think that the broader point here is that on Windows, you have one basic graphical shell that basically all desktop users are expected to have running. It's not completely impossible to hack up a Windows environment to avoid doing so, but it's a highly nonstandard configuration, and stuff is going to break.
Linux has a much broader range of options available, and those are first-class citizens. Some of them are considerably lighter on resource usage than others.
A lot of users aren't going to cobble together their own ideal environment the way I do, but there are "presets" of packages that are aimed specifically at being light on resource usage. XFCE has historically been one example; they were slow to move to Wayland, but it looks like they're doing it now. One doesn't have the sort of "the OS vendor is giving you one monolithic blob that you need to run" the way you do on Windows.