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Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

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141–150 of 198 posts

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#141
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XFCE is saddled with its GTK requirement, and GTK gets worse with every version. Even though XFCE is still on GTK3, that's a big downgrade from GTK2 because it forces you to run Wayland if you don't want your GUI frame rate arbitrary capped at 60 fps. For people wanting the old-fashioned fast and simple GUI experience, I recommend LXQt.

What use is there in display frame rates above 60 fps?

> What use is there in display frame rates above 60 fps?

On a CRT monitor the difference between running at 60 Hz and even a just slightly better 72 Hz was night and day. Unbearable flickening vs a much better experience. I remember having some little utility for Windows that'd allow the display rate to be 75 (not 72 but 75). Under Linux I was writing modelines myself (these were the days!) to have the refresh rate and screen size (in pixels) I liked: I was running "weird" resolutions like 832x604 @ 75 Hz instead of 800x600 @ 60 Hz, just to gain a little bit more screen real estate and better refresh rate.

Now since monitors started using flat panels: I sure as heck have no idea if 60 fps vs 120 fps or whatever change anything for a "desktop" usage. I don't think the problem of the image fading too quickly at 60 Hz that CRT had is still present. But I'm not sure about it.

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#142
Many commenters blows up here but you have to see this from the non-informed consumer perspective I think.

What I mean is, yes, WE know Win11 barely works with 4GB and WE know that 6gb is quite generous for a Linux machine, but they don't.

The general public isn't as informed as we think they are (which is proven by 75 million people last election).

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#143
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's plain FUD. systemd always had fields for the full name, email address and location. They were optional, just like the date of birth. Bad systemd!

Is not FUD; the full name, email and the rest were not META/corporations mandated, which are lobbying for it so they can earn money with users' preferences. Get your spyware to somewhere else. If META's business model is not lucrative, is not my problem.

>which are lobbying for it so they can earn money with users' preferences

Given it's a field where you can put absolutely anything in (and probably randomize, if you want), how is this different than the situation today, where random sites ask you for your birthday (also unverified)? Moreover Meta already has your birthday. It's already mandated for account creation, so claims of "so they can earn money with users' preferences" don't make any sense.

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#144
post #27

>Linux's advantage is slowly shrinking Maybe in some ways, yes. But there are distros out there that can run easily in as little as 1G RAM. And I heard people have used it with far less. I also remember hearing Ubuntu moved to default to Wayland, if true I have to wonder if defaulting to Wayland is part of the problem because Gnome / KDE on Wayland will use far more memory than FVWM / Fluxbox on X11. FWIW, you can do…

> But there are distros out there that can run easily in as little as 1G RAM It always make me chuckle when I hear this. Default server (ie no GUI at all) installation of a RHEL derivative just outright dies silently with 1GB of RAM if there is no swap. Sure with the enabled swap it no longer dies but to say what the performance is anywhere performant is to lie to yourself.

RHEL is not the be-all end-all of minimalist linux, even sans GUI. Puppy Linux, with a full WM, is completely usable with a single gig of ram. That's obviously a different use-case from RHEL but the point stands.

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also believe that this memory usage might be decreased significantly, but I don't know how much (and how much is worth it). Some RAM usage might be useful, such as caching or for things related with graphics. Some is a cumulative bloat in applications caused by not caring much or duplication of used libraries. But I remember in 2016 Fedora Gnome consumed about 1.6GB of RAM on my PC with 2GB of RAM a decade ago. Con…

Buy why that much? The first computer I bought had 192MB of RAM and I ran a 1600x1200 desktop with 24-bit color. When Windows 2000 came out, all of the transparency effects ran great. Office worked fine, Visual Studio, 1024x768 gaming (I know that’s quite a step down from 1080p). What has changed? Why do I need 10x the RAM to open a handful of terminals and a text editor?

Partly because we have more layers of abstraction. Just an extreme example, when you open a tiny Partly because increased RAM usage can sometimes improve execution speed / smoothness or security (caching, browser tab isolation).

Partly because developers have less pressure to optimize software performance, so they optimize other things, such as development time.

Here is an article about bloat: https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-11-04/some-software-bloat-...

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#146
post #26
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MacOS handles memory pressure better than Linux imo (at least for interactive use cases) I have seen MacOS overcommit up to 50% of memory and still have the system be responsive. Yesterday I filled up my ram accidentally on Fedora and even earlyoom took several minutes to trigger and in the meantime the system was essentially non-responsive

The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.

It's exactly what it is

How do you think data is created? It's lots of anecdotes, normalised.

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#147
> Canonical isn’t making 6GB memory a hard requirement for Ubuntu 26.04. It will still install on machines that fall below the minimum requirement, but users will have to deal with slower performance.

I think we have quite different definition of "minimum requirement", then.

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also believe that this memory usage might be decreased significantly, but I don't know how much (and how much is worth it). Some RAM usage might be useful, such as caching or for things related with graphics. Some is a cumulative bloat in applications caused by not caring much or duplication of used libraries. But I remember in 2016 Fedora Gnome consumed about 1.6GB of RAM on my PC with 2GB of RAM a decade ago. Con…

I remember running Xubuntu (XFCE) and Lubuntu (LXDE, before LXQt) on a laptop with 4 GB of RAM and it was a pretty pleasant experience! My guess is that the desktop environment is the culprit for most modern distros!

Gnome 50 and its auxilliary services on my machine uses maybe 400MB.

The culprit is browsers, mostly.

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#149

I had a machine (an AMD 3700X with 32 GB of RAM and a fast NVMe SSD) on which I used to run Debian. Then about 2.5 years ago I bought a new one and gave my wife the 3700X: I figured out she'd be more at ease so I installed Ubuntu on it. I couldn't understand why everything was that slow compared to Debian and didn't want to bother looking into it so... After a few weeks: got rid of Ubuntu, installed her Debian. A sim…

I had used ubuntu back in the day, and when I came back to linux a bit ago I immediately installed it again.

I don't remember all of my frustrations, but I remember having a lot of trouble with snap. Specifically, it really annoyed me that the default install of firefox was the snap version instead of native. I want that to be an opt-in kind of thing. I found that flatpak just worked better anyway.

I almost tried making the switch to arch, but I've been pretty happy running debian sid (unstable) since. The debian installer is just more friendly to me for getting encrypted drives and partitions set up how I want.

It's not for everyone, but I like the structured rolling updates of sid and having access to the debian ecosystem too much to switch to something else at this point.

I use sway with a radeon card for my primary and have a secondary nvidia card for games and AI stuff.

It has its warts, but I love my debian+sway setup

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#150
post #69

From my understanding this is an official statement, not a benchmark result. > The change isn't about the core operating system becoming resource-hungry. Instead, it reflects the way people use computers today—multiple browser tabs, web apps, and multitasking workflows, all of which demand additional memory. So it is more about the 3rd party software instead of OS or desktop environment. Actually, nowadays it's recom…

Also, the Windows 11 requirements are ludicrous. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-specifica... 4GB of RAM? What? I guess if your minimum is "able to start Windows and eventually reach the desktop", sure? I wouldn't even use Windows 11 with 8GB even though it would theoretically be okay.

> 4GB of RAM? What? I guess if your minimum is "able to start Windows and eventually reach the desktop", sure? I wouldn't even use Windows 11 with 8GB even though it would theoretically be okay.

Not okay as soon as you throw on the first security tool, lol.

I work in an enterprise environment with Win 11 where 16 GB is capped out instantly as soon as you open the first browser tab thanks to the background security scans and patch updates. This is even with compressed memory paging being turned on.

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