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Comment by trekkie99 | Hacker News Reader

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

The article suggests that Xubuntu (which uses xfce instead of Gnome) uses much less memory. I don't know how true that is, but it seems reasonable that xfce uses some less memory.

We expect xfce is much more efficient (it has more basic features) but is that the cause? Are you just subtracting out a big part from a higher baseline?

sure probably even git a bit less,

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

It is not actually an issue. The article isn’t based on any technical aspects of the OS, just the reported system requirements.

If it was a Gnome issue it would also be a Fedora issue though, no?

Depends on the packaging no? I'm not sure you get 100% the same experience even with the same Gnome version across Fedora, Ubuntu and Arch, do you?

I think this is a snap issue.

I’d imagine that all of Canonical’s flavors/spins ship with snap, so if the resources are lighter on say xubuntu then it’s probably not snap.

Snap still kinda egh though ;-D

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_.

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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.

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