Posted by jnord 1 day ago
My desktop runs Arch with Sway (so quite close), three monitors, and uses ~400MB ram after boot. Most of it are the framebuffers. All the rest is eaten by Firefox, rust-analyzer and qemu.
1.5TB in /var/log
All from the Firefox snap package complaining every millisecond about some trivial Snap permission.
I'm glad I chose an OS without goddamn Snap. It's been unadulterated pain every time I've ever interacted with it.
but I still would recommend 6 GiB.
no matter of the OS
the problem here is more the programs you run on top of the OS (browser, electron apps, etc.)
realistic speaking you should budged at least 1GiB for you OS even if it's minimalist, and to avoid issues make it 2GiB of OS + some emergency buffer, caches, load spikes etc.
and 2GiB for your browser :(
and 500MiB for misc apps (mail, music, etc.)
wait we are already at 4.5 GiB I still need open office ....
even if xfc would safe 500 MiB it IMHO wouldn't matter (for the recommendation)
and sure you can make it work, can only have one tab open at a time, close the browser every time you don't need it, not use Spotify or YT etc.
but that isn't what people expect, so give them a recommendation which will work with what they expect and if someone tries to run it at smaller RAM it may work, but if it doesn't it at least isn't your fault
Snap still kinda egh though ;-D
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_.
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(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.
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 simple "IceWM" WM (I use the tiling "Awesome WM" but that's too radical for my wife) and she loves it.
She basically manages her two SMEs entirely from a browser: Chromium or Firefox (but a fork of Firefox would do too).
It works so well since years now that for her latest hire she asked me to set her with the same config. So she's now got one employee on a Debian machine with the IceWM WM. Other machines are still on Windows but the plan is to only keep one Windows (just in case) and move the other machines to Debian too.
Unattended upgrades, a trivial firewall "everything OUT or IN but related/established allowed" and that's it.
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
Nothing in UI should take longer to draw than the human reaction time (~250ms). Most linux distros I tried pass this snappiness test with flying colors. Windows after Windows 7 don't.
Besides, Ubuntu is just 1 distro. There will always be alternatives on Linux for lower resource usage.
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 a lot just from the console without a GUI w/Linux and any BSD, in that case the RAM usage will be tiny compared to Windows and Apple.
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/RHEL-like, just like Ubuntu is thevgeneral purpose distroes and the point of the minimal sysrq for running is for them, not for the excercises in the RAM golfing.
2: Win11 is not usable with 4GB
3: Trisquel 12 Ecne exists. You might need Xanmos as a propietary kernel because of hardware, but try to blacklist mei and mei_me first in some .conf file at /lib/modprobe.d. Value your privacy.
Trisquel Mate with zram-config and some small tweaks can work with 4GB of RAM even with a browser with dozens of Tabs, at least with UBlock Origin.