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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 recommended to have 8+ GB of RAM, regardless of OS.

I just checked the memory usage on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS after closing all the browser tabs. It's about 2GB of 16GB total RAM. 26.04 LTS might have higher RAM usage but it seems unlikely that it will get anywhere close to 6GB.

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.

It's not just the applications, the installer doesn't even start up with 1GiB of memory. With 2GiB of memory it does start up. You could (well, I would :) ) blame it on the Gnome desktop, but it is very different from what I would have expected.

I just tested this with 25.10 desktop, default gnome. With 24.04 LTS it doesn't even start up with 2GiB.

If you run Windows 11 with Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Outlook on a 4GB machine you're gonna have a bad day.
No because as far as we know 26.04 won't enable zswap or zram whereas Windows and MacOS both have memory compression technology of some sort. So Ubuntu will use significantly more memory for most tasks when facing memory pressure.

Apparently it's still in discussion but it's April now so seems unlikely.

Kind of weird how controversial it is considering DOS had QEMM386 way back in 1987.

I know 2GB isn't very heavy in OS terms these days, but it's still enough to hold nearly 350 uncompressed 1080p 24-bit images.

There's rather a lot of information in a single uncompressed 1080p image. I can't help but wonder what it all gets used to for.

That's subjective and I would be more comfortable if that's called as Recommended memory, not Minimum memory.

Minimum memory as in this change sets a completely different expectation.

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 world of text editors and other simple apps written in electron.

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.
The whole linux stack got bigger though - just look at what you need now to compile stuff, cmake, meson/ninja, mesa, llvm and so forth. gtk2 was great; GTK is now a GNOMEy-toolkit only, controlled by one main corporation. Systemd increased the bloat factor too - and also gathers age data of users now (https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954).

I guess one of the few smaller things would be wayland, but this has so few features that you have to wonder why it is even used.

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.

I used gtk2, it was ok, but I preferred Ubuntu's Unity interface when it came out.

Gnome 3 seems similar to Unity nowadays, and it is pretty good.

I find it much easier to use than Windows or Mac, which is credit to the engineers who work on it.

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 them, but I do use Fedora, so I would imagine that the memory footprint cannot be too different. Whilst I could easily get away with <8gb ram, you really kind of don't want too if you're going to be doing anything heavier than web browsing or editing documents. Dev work? Or CAD, Design etc etc. But this isn't unique to Linux.

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.

Since the dawn of time, Microsoft has published the minimum system requirements needed to run Windows, not what you need to actually do something useful with it.
Last time I touched an Ubuntu system, I had to diagnose why the machine suddenly had no available disk space.

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.

> Linux's advantage is slowly shrinking

This is garbage writing. Linux’s advantages are numerous and growing. Ubuntu ≠ Linux. WRT RAM requirements, Win 11’s 4GB requirement isn’t viable for daily use and won’t represent any practical machine configuration that has the requisite TPM 2 module. On the other side, the Linux ecosystem offers a wide variety of minimal distributions that can run on ancient hardware.

Maybe I’m just grouchy today but I would flag this content if sloppy MS PR was a valid reason.

For comparison, here are the official hardware recommendations for Debian: https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/ch03s04.en.html

"With Desktop" has 1GB minimum and 2GB recommended - along with Pentium 4, 1GHz cpu.

  > Linux's advantage is slowly shrinking
Ubuntu is not Linux. Also, would love to see Windows running on 4GB.
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 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.

The framing of the article is very odd.

It says that Ubuntu increase the requirements not because of the OS itself but to have a better user experience when people have many browser tabs opened. Then it compares to Windows which has lower nominal requirements but higher requirements in practice to get a passable user experience.

Windows 11's 4 GB minimum is dishonest. You cannot reasonably run it on that little, it is far too bloated at this point. Even LTSC benefits from 6 GB, and that is substantially cut-down compared to retail/enterprise.

I'd say Windows 11's real minimal is 8 GB in 2026, with the recommended being 16 GB.

PS - And even at 8 GB, it hits 100% usage and pages under moderate load or e.g. Windows Update running in the background.

I have the state of the art Windows 11 Canary Version 29560.1000 (Beta) version running on a PC with 4GB of RAM which is not even officially supported. Ironically Microsoft themselves overrode their own requirements for me as I was one of the volunteers from the Windows 10 Dev Channel days as they wanted those who helped them create Windows 11 see the final result as a "thank you" even though the hardware was not officially good enough.

I don't know how they have done it but with the latest updates to Windows 11 (In the Canary Channel, Optional 29000 series) it is VERY fast in Chrome, even on a PC with just 4GB Ram.

So all those mocking and laughing say you might just get a window up haven't a clue what they are talking about. It WAS terrible but now it is much much better. I don't know how they have done it but they have. It might be due to Microsoft's aim to rewrite the kernel in RUST and other things.

I changed to devuan, now it uses 75 MB ram on idle.
>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 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.

Why is this here? Extreme clickbait for those without tech literacy
God I miss openstep and CDE. It needs 16MB RAM (yes MB!) and together with a lighweight firefox clone you get everything you need. Eye candy is nice to have but not at that cost.
I don't mind my OS using quite a bit of RAM, as long as UI elements are not drawn with HTML, and don't take as long to render as it would take to download a JPEG on a dial up connection in 1995.

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.

But we already know Ubuntu is the “worst” (most like modern windows, setup for media consumption, etc).

You can install Debian and it gives you all that you are familiar with from Ubuntu.

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 browser then that will dominate your resource requirements and there's nothing Linux can do about that.

I switched to Debian a long time ago for both desktops and servers. For me personally I don’t see what value prop Ubuntu even has anymore, apart from maybe having ZFS in the kernel. Support maybe? I’ve never used it personally so I don’t know if it’s any good, but for any serious shop willing to spend money on support I’d probably go with RHEL anyway.
1: ZRAM exists

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.

I was testing them on a HP laptop I bought for $200 with 4GB of RAM.

Windows, its default, used so much memory that there was not much left for apps.

Ubuntu used 500MB less than Windows in system monitor. I think it was still 1GB or more. It also appeared to run more slowly than it used to on older hardware.

Lubuntu used hundreds of MB less than Ubuntu. It could still run the same apps but had less features in UI (eg search). It ran lightening fast with more, simultaneous apps.

(Note: That laptop's Wifi card wouldn't work with any Linux using any technique I tried. Sadly, I had to ditch it.)

I also had Lubuntu on a 10+ year old Thinkpad with an i7 (2nd gen). It's been my daily machine for a long time. The newer, USB installers wouldn't work with it. While I can't recall the specifics, I finally found a way to load an Ubuntu-like interface or Ubuntu itself through the Lubuntu tech. It's now much slower but still lighter than default Ubuntu or Windows.

(Note: Lubuntu was much lighter and faster on a refurbished Dell laptop I tested it on, too.)

God blessed me recently by a person who outright gave me an Acer Nitro with a RTX and Windows. My next step is to figure out the safest way to dual boot Windows 11 and Linux for machine learning without destroying the existing filesystem or overshrinking it.

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).

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.

How much RAM does Omarchy use? Anyone running the OS after the media hyped it a couple of months back?
> 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.

Is this a Ubuntu issue or a Gnome issue? What about Lubuntu, Kubuntu, etc?
The amount of people still on less than 8gb of memory is really small.
I imagine the choice of desktop environment has most to do with RAM requirements in Linux.

Unrelated to this, despite Ubuntu’s popularity, I think it’s one of the worst distro choices out there, especially for including old kernels for essentially no discernible reason.

I wouldn’t go so far as defending Microslop but I do get tired of the Apple fanboys accusing Windows of being bloated and running poorly.

They seem to defend Apple’s 8GB machines by saying that Apple systems perform better than Windows with the same amount of RAM. This claim is entirely unsubstantiated.

Windows has a lot of problems but performance and memory efficiency is not one of them. We should recall that Microsoft actually reduced RAM usage and minimum requirements between windows 7 and 8 as they wanted to get into the tablet game, and Windows has remained efficient with memory since then as Microsoft wants Windows to come with cheap Chromebook-like hardware and other similar low-end systems.

Fat chance, Satya!
Switched to SuSE a few years ago, still love it
Maybe if FOSS was less focused on reverse engineering proprietary technology they could make products people LIKE. I say this as someone who learned about firmware because of several listeners and one group having the aim of reverse engineering my new Apple ecosystem that is now falling apart after signal traps. My crime was working for an ISP and the media, but I reported on Scienos not techbros. Yawn.

I knew they were fucking with my virtual memory cause theirs sucks, the partition schemes on this Mac mini were ridiculous and the helpers weren’t stealing my information.

Linux needs to go back to engineering again.
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?