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.
2GB is a lot
Just use Debian
Or arch
I use arch myself but I don’t think it’s a good alternative top Ubuntu
or if you can’t get that to go (i had some hardware support issues) look to MX Linux or Linux Mint XFCE
Mint is based on Ubuntu.
yes but Linux Mint XFCE doesn’t use all the heavy weight sytems that mean Ubuntu desktop needs 6 GB ram. for that matter, Xubuntu will, too, but fuck canonical.
however, as much as i loathe canonical i’m not gonna attract people to more secure from bullshit solutions if i’m net willing to meet them where they are. i’d rather we all be on debian however if even i can’t get my laptop to work properly with it, i’m gonna direct some people to mint just to get them a little farther afield.
LMDE is based on Debian.
Use Debian if you want a system like Ubuntu that isn’t full of Canonical’s corporate shit. Ubuntu is based on Debian.
Would lmde be as good?
Yeah, LMDE is pretty good. I used it for a couple of years during my rage-against-Ubuntu phase.
Honestly, dont take anyones recommendation. It takes 10 minutes to create a bootable USB for a Linux distro once you get the hang of it. Try a handful of different “easy” distros and desktops on a Saturday morning and pick one that seems to work well on your computer and that you find you like. What you find intuitive isnt necessarily good for another, etc. A little time invested in shopping will pay off later (which is true for a lot of things).
Regardless of the OS, if you’re using the computer for anything productive, the application software, not the OS, will eat the majority of the RAM anyway. If you’re looking at the minimum requirements, chances are you’re not looking to do anything besides browsing the web with 5 tabs open.
It sucks though, I agree - software should get more efficient over time, just like hardware does. Out of curiosity, do we have anything more specific, i.e. how they tested that, what apps were running and so on? Or maybe they now deem that more things should be running?
Your example goes far beyond 4 GB of ram lol
I remember that with Opera (before the switch to Chromium) I was able to open literally 100+ tabs on a machine with 1 gig of RAM. Sure, the web was simpler back then, but not by much.
Which is exactly what Ubuntu is doing. The desktop and even most native desktop applications that come with it will run just fine with 1 or 2GB of ram. If you used it like a 90s computer for 90s computer tasks, it will work fine.
In practice, however, users will open a web browser to some “modern” websites or a couple electron apps and have a very bad experience.
It sucks though, I agree - software should get more efficient over time, just like hardware does.
It generally does, for any given computing task, but the problem is that generally software adds more features over time, not least of which is supporting new hardware that hits the ecosystem.
IN THIS ECONOMY???
Worst timing for sure
can no longer say Linux is free
This is not Linux, this is Ubuntu, you can run Linux on the map on the back of a cereal box.
was trying to reference the minimum specs meme for Linux that goes like “Linux: memory (optional)”
That’s a short and spiffy summation of the article.
I know, right? Read the room!
“HERE’S A NICKLE, KID. GET YOURSELF A BETTER COMPUTER.”
20 years ago when Scott Adams was still a moderately sane human.
Great move in these times where RAM is cheap and widely available
Canonical has never been accused of being able to read the room.
Canonical is incompetent in general
That dog is so dead by now
A dog dies twice. The first time is when its soul leaves its body, and the second time is when the meme of it is posted the last time.
what the dog doin
If you’re strugging to afford an 8GB RAM chip, you may want to reconsider some of your life choices. Even with current market prices.
Poverty = life choices is the most reddit I’ve seen in Lemmy in a long while
No doubt the two aren’t always connected, but in the US at least, 8gb isnt exactly breaking the average American household’s bank. And if it is, yeah I’d argue they’re doing something wrong in their decisions. One could mow a few lawns and have enough cash to keep up with the modern requirements of an OS.
“No doubt they are always connected but I double down anyway”.
One could mow a few lawns and have enough cash to keep up with the modern requirements of an 0S.
Now that’s not just reddit, thats Fox News levels disconnect with reality.
The median daily income in the USA is 70$ https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income
According to T Mobile the average phone bill per month in the USA is 156$.
https://www.t-mobile.com/dialed-in/wireless/average-phone-bill-per-month
On newegg you can buy 8TV ram for $15.76 https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=RAM+8gb&Submit=ENE&pageTitle=RAM+8gb&Order=1
So yes, he’s fucking right. Most people in the USA can afford 8GB RAM and if they cannot, they should consider looking into their expenditures.
I’m speaking American since you’re quoting Fox News… Because it seems you’re so self aware you forgot other countries exist. But that’s just you’re average Lemmy user “I’m more woke than you” kind of bullshit.
Fucking hell you people are so tiring. Nobody supports anything going against its own world view. You make me cringe so fucking much.
WTF you gonna do with PC3 ram, you have a good supply of ancient hardware or something?
Run ubuntu.
I’m quoting Fox because the other mentioned US. Blame them for US centrism, but then please update your incomes and costs to somewhere like Somalia, or even Greece. But that would be too woke or something?
Even if most people can, that doesn’t mean that if you can’t is because of bad decisions. That means being homeless is because of bad decisions. That means that those already on debt for medical issues made a bad decision.
For a lot of people spending those 16 dollars on RAM is the bad decision.
BTW, median income is absurd. You can have income and still spend on living expenses more than you earn. Now please tell me people needs to move to rural Ohio to maw grass to buy 8 gigs of RAM.
Edit: somehow I’ve struck a nerve with people from programing.dev who created the account on the same day, never commented anything and saw my comment within a few minutes of one another. I think I’ve struck a nerve :)
What a fucking dumb hill to die on when factually proven wrong.
Average phone bill per month is 156$? Wtf do u have to do to get such a high phone bill lol
that’s probably per ‘household’ not ‘per line’ or ‘per person’.
Dont ask me idk
Never thought I’d see “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” being used to defend inflated RAM prices, it’s getting wild over here
JFC. Zero self awareness here. Peak fucking American.
Most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Surviving off creditcards and buy now pay later.
Something tells me you don’t exactly have your finger on the pulse of “average” America.
Fuck out of here with this bullshit
It’s not the one thing that’s gone to hell. rent is on it’s way up all over the world, unemployment is way up, food costs are up. Ram, SSD, Gas, Electricity. Over the past year, most things have gotten more expensive. Evevrything has gone up except salaries.
Transport costs are about to skyrocket. That’ll add several more percent on everything.
From an indie dev standpoint, maybe you’re just insulated more than most.
You’re right. I’m a developer making great money and I dont want to pay these prices. I should have stayed in retail so it would never even be an option to consider.
Me with 16 GB on my computer
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
That’s not an argument for me, because less RAM usage by the operating system leaves you with more resources left for your applications and programms.
They’re raising it because of RAM needs of browsers and GNOME.
If you’re a shell nerd like me, you’ll still be fine running it on a potato.
It’s an illuminating experience to go to a store with Apple computers with 8GB of RAM on display, and browse to a RAM-heavy unoptimized website like YouTube or even Reddit now.
Open a few tabs.
Open a dozen.
You’d be surprised what a decently coded OS can pull off without compromising on the visuals.This is something people who call themselves tech nerds often don’t understand, they only seem understand “bigger number better!”. I have a vastly more enjoyable experience with a Mac than most Windows machines, (for many reasons, but most importantly for what you said).
Bigger is always better. For hardware.
On the other hand, less is always more for software.
It’s not size that matters but how you use it
That’s not what they tell me. Heheheheh!
I used to believe this too, and unfortunately my experience on Linux kind of backed this up. I assumed that it would always be features = resource usage. XFCE is light because it’s missing things. GNOME is heavy because it has good window management and keyboard shortcuts. Windows 10 is heavy for the same reasons as GNOME.
The trueism kind of works if nothing else changes, but in this case, there’s no reason the codebase between Windows, Linux, and Mac would be the same.
Or webbrowser for that matter.
I always thought Gnome 3 was bloated.
A full potato? Lol, when I was young I had nothing but a french fry, scavenged from a McDonald’s bin.
You had McDonalds? That was just a farm in my day. Eee-eye-eee-eye-oh!
Nah, my village just had the bin
I wonder how much of this is just modern web apps… even running without a containerized distro and a leaner DE - I still have +90% of my RAM taken up by websites.
Modern UI development is such fucking shit. I have no idea why they went with all of these heavyweight shit frameworks.
Seriously, why do so many simple websites take more than and run worse that so many video games?
I thought part of the point was to have a website work more as an application: one update to a piece of information results in that information being near instantly updated across the site.
Then I looked into the angular stuff the UI people were working on and yeah… something like 10 (costly) requests for the same exact fucking JSON. They were talking about doing caching on the frontend to optimize it. What are we even doing?!
In this economy?
Shocked i got this far without someone blaming snaps
i blame snaps
- Everything is a framework under a framework running on a pseudo virtual machine. 6 GB are just for the notepad and the mouse driver.
Fun thing, I just booted up an old computer. Started right up. It had Ubuntu 11.10 on it.
Now, I obviously didn’t connect the thing to the Internet. Updates would have probably failed hard. Not because it’s missing over a decade of updates so there might be some complications on that front, but because it’s a Pentium III with Definitely Not Even a Gigabyte of memory. (Oh and a Nvidia GeForce 2 MX. I’m pretty sure that’s not supported by… any driver any more.)
Clone the hard drive and see what happens!
I’m putting money on what we in the business technically refer to as “complete pants shitting”
That’s pretty much what a browser needs these days.
Reject modernity. Embrace lynx browser from terminal.
Gemini protocol is pretty good and minimal. But very little usage unfortunately.
