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?
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.
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 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.