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Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

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Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#71

Post by superkuh »

goalieca wrote: post #20

I hear a lot from linux users that found gtk 2 era on x11 as pretty close to perfect. I know i had run ubuntu and after boot it used far less than 1GB. The desktop experience was perhaps even slightly more polished than what we have today. Not much has fundamentally changed except the bloat and a regression on UX where they started chasing fads. I suppose the most major change on RAM usage is electron and the bloated…

Yep. I still develop Gtk2 applications today. It's a very snappy and low resource usage toolkit aimed entirely at desktop computers. None of that "mobile" convergence. I suppose you could put Gtk2 applications into containers of some sort but since Gtk2 has (luckily) been left alone by GNOME for decades it's a stable target (like NES or N64 is a stable target) and there's no need for it.

Most of the bloat these days is from containers and Canonical's approach to Ubuntu since ~2014 has been very heavy on using upstream containers so they don't have to actually support their software ecosystem themselves. This has lead to severe bloat and bad graphical theming and file system access.

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#72

Post by dathinab »

trekkie99 wrote: post #14

Is this a Ubuntu issue or a Gnome issue? What about Lubuntu, Kubuntu, etc?

neither, they didn't measure anything

they compared the Ubuntu minimal recommended RAM to Windows absolute minimal RAM requirements.

but Windows has monetary incentives (related to vendors) to say they support 4GiB of RAM even if windows runs very shitty on it, on the other had Ubuntu is incentivized to provider a more realistic minimum for convenient usage

I mean taking a step back all common modern browsers under common usage can easily use multiple GiB of memory and that is outside of the control of the OS vendor. (1)

As consequence IMHO recommending anything below 6 GiB is just irresponsible (iff a modern browser is used) _not matter what OS you use_.

---

(1): If there is no memory pressure (i.e. caches doesn't get evicted that fast, larger video buffers are used, no fast tab archiving etc.) then having YT playing likely will consume around ~600-800 MiB.(Be aware that this is not just JS memory usage but the whole usage across JS, images, video, html+css engine etc. For comparison web mail like proton or gmail is often roughly around 300MiB, Spotify interestingly "just" around 200MiB, and HN around 55MiB.

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#73

Post by dwedge »

bjackman wrote: post #37

The article itself acknowledges that the headline is bullshit: > 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 Basically the change reflects the fact that, at this level of analysis (how much RAM do I need in my consumer PC), the OS is irrelevant these days. If you use a web…

The headline is clickbait and the acknowledgement is LLM

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#74

Post by oreally »

whatevaa wrote: post #38

Win11 barely works with 4GB. Like, you can have a browser with youtube on and that's it, 90%+ memory usage. I know because that is one of my media PC (instead of smart tv). Can't move to Linux because it's Intel Atom and Intel P-state driver for that is borked, never fixed.

Today's browsers tend to be huge memory hogs too. Software's attitude of "there's always more memory" is coming back to bite them as prices of ram increase.

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#75

Post by worthless-trash »

kergonath wrote: post #41
worthless-trash wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is with earlyoom/systemd-oomd enabled ?

From my experience it does not help much, and I still get occasional freezes when a program misbehaves on Linux. It’s not a huge problem, but it is a problem and it exists; I have been dealing with it for about 15 years with no significant improvement.

The earlyoom/oomd changes are quite recent.. I've had a 'better' experience, but I guess it's not really fixed yet.

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#76

Post by sunshine-o »

intothemild wrote: post #3

Two things First, it sounds like this 6gb requirement is more like a suggestion/recommendation than a requirement. I also am curious if it actually actively uses all 6gb. From my own usage of Linux over the years the OS itself isn't using that much ram, but the application is, which is almost always the browser. Secondly. I haven't used Ubuntu desktop in years. So I have no real idea if this is something specific to…

I happened to install Fedora Silverblue on a computer a few days ago and looked quickly at the memory usage after boot: it was about 6gb ! I usually run Alpine or FreeBSD, so I thought: great that thing consumes 10x the RAM.

I believe Fedora and Ubuntu use about the same set of technologies: systemd, wayland, Gnome, etc. so it is about the same.

Apart from working out of the box I do not really know what those distros have and I don't. I just have to admit managing network interfaces is really easy in Gnome.

With the skyrocketing price of RAM this might finally be the year of the Linux desktop. But it is not gonna be Gnome I guess.

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#77

Post by mrob »

john01dav wrote: post #25
goalieca wrote: post #20

I hear a lot from linux users that found gtk 2 era on x11 as pretty close to perfect. I know i had run ubuntu and after boot it used far less than 1GB. The desktop experience was perhaps even slightly more polished than what we have today. Not much has fundamentally changed except the bloat and a regression on UX where they started chasing fads. I suppose the most major change on RAM usage is electron and the bloated…

Just stick XFCE on a modern minimal-ish (meaning not Ubuntu, mainly) distribution and you'll have this with modern compatibility. Debian and Fedora are both good options. If you want something more minimal as your XFCE basd, there are other options too.

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.

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#78

Post by imtringued »

curt15 wrote: post #4

Given that efficiency one of Linux's most touted advantages, what in the world is Ubuntu's PR department thinking? Ubuntu isn't providing any more functionality than when its memory requirement was 4GB. What is hogging all that extra ram?

I don't know what Ubuntu is doing with the RAM but I'm constantly swapping with all of the 16GB RAM filled on my work laptop with Ubuntu.

At home I have a desktop running Arch plus Gnome with 32GB RAM and I am at 7GB on a normal day and below 16GB at all times unless I run an LLM.

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#79

Post by gchamonlive »

With arch+hyprland I hit 5GiB for a zen browser instance with 15+ tabs and a kitty instance with 15+ windows across 5 tabs, with codex and vim running.

If ram is a problem there's always alternatives. The impediment is always having to rethink your workflow or adopting someone else's opinion.

Re: Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11

#80

Post by throw-the-towel »

mcswell wrote: post #22
Synaesthesia wrote: post #12

The amount of people still on less than 8gb of memory is really small.

On the contrary, those are mostly really overweight people, so the amount of them is quite large. The number of them is, however, small. :)

Doesn't "amount" just mean "number"?
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