this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2026
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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.
It seems to imply that software has gotten way worse in the last 10 years.
All of the default software that comes with the Ubuntu desktop will run reasonably well with 2Gb. Its the websites and electon apps (i.e., websites) that will make it swap. That and modern users that want to keep dozens of programs or websites open -which users 10 or 20 years ago may have known not to do.
Worse is relative, a proportion of the requirement increase will be due to worse code, but much more will be for features to make the software more accessible to more people, and adding features without needing to remove old ones, neither of which are a bad thing, otherwise everything would be a command line tool that removes options every few months and only has one way to use it
no it is not reasonable. What the hell do they need an extra 2gb for? What the hell is the operating system taking up that much resources for?
My first pc needed 4MiB of ram for the os. Why does this need 1536x as much to provide.... not much else tbh?
According to the article linked in the article, it's not that the operating system itself is more demanding, but more that the DE, and Browsers/Websites are more demanding now.
It feels like that Canonical basically needs to do the games thing of having a set of minimum specs for Ubuntu to run at all, and a recommend specs for Ubuntu to run well. Canonically basically bumped up the latter, but it's being taken as the former.
I mean the headline in your linked article literally calls it the 'minimum system requirements' not 'reccomended'. Games have had two sets of requirements for decades, I don't see why they couldn't do the same. Regardless if you need to run Linux on older/less powerful hardware there's much better choices than Ubuntu, which is designed to be as beginner-friendly as possible at the cost of performance and customizability as is, so in their case I guess it kinda makes sense to dumb it down.
Ubuntu is the Windows of Linux.
It's getting more and more bloated with unnecessary and unwanted things, because of canonicals bad management decisions. They seemingly care more about "business" rather than users.
I’m not a fan, but thats extreme. The Ubuntu desktop will boot to the DE on half a gig of ram, and can open basic desktop apps with 1 or 2. Its the websites, containered apps, and more complex applications that Ubuntu is worried about UX disappointment from naive users (which is their segment). Windows 11 requires many times that just to get to a desktop and open a text file in notepad. They are not the same.
2GB is a lot