Does Ubuntu Now Require More RAM Than Windows 11? (omgubuntu.co.uk)
- Reference: 0181223126
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/04/04/2158228/does-ubuntu-now-require-more-ram-than-windows-11
- Source link: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2026/04/ubuntu-2604-system-requriments
> Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) set the floor at 1GB — a modest ask when it launched [2]more than a decade ago in 2014. Then came the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) that pushed the number to 4GB, surviving quite well in the era of 16GB being considered standard for mid-range laptops.... Ubuntu's new minimum requirement lands in an interesting spot when compared against Windows 11. Microsoft's operating system [3]requires just 4GB RAM , although real-world usage often tells a different story. Usually, 8GB is considered the sweet spot to handle modern apps and multitasking.
The blog OMG Ubuntu argues this change is " [4]not because Ubuntu requires 2GB more memory than it did , but more the way we compute does."
> it's more of an honesty bump. Components that make up the distro — the GNOME desktop and extensions, modern web browsers (and the sites we load in them) and the kinds of apps we use (and keep running) whilst multitasking are more demanding... The Resolute Raccoon's memory requirements better reflect real-world multitasking.
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> Ubuntu 26.04 LTS can be installed on devices with less than 6GB RAM (but not less than 25GB of disk space). The experience may not be as smooth or as responsive as developers intend (so you don't get to complain), but it will work. I installed Ubuntu 26.04 Beta on a laptop with just 2 GB of memory — slow to the point of frustration in use, but otherwise functional.
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> If you have a device with 4 GB RAM and you can't upgrade (soldered memory is a thing, and e-waste can be avoided), then alternatives exist. Many Ubuntu flavours, like Lubuntu, have lower system requirements than the main edition. Plus, there's always the manual option using the Ubuntu netboot installer to install a base system and then built out a more minimal system from there.
[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/ubuntu-now-requires-more-ram-than-windows-11/
[2] https://www.howtogeek.com/heres-what-ubuntu-linux-looked-like-10-years-ago/
[3] https://www.howtogeek.com/873742/windows-11-how-much-ram-can-your-pc-have/
[4] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2026/04/ubuntu-2604-system-requriments
Linux desktop with 16 Mb RAM (Score:3)
was possible in the 90s. Even 8 Mb.
Re: (Score:2)
My Emacs only needs 8Mb! (but it's constantly swapping)
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> Linux desktop with 16 Mb RAM was possible in the 90s
No, 2MB was never enough for a Linux desktop. I had 8MB on my 386 and it was only just sufficient.
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The first Unix machine that I used had 1MB of RAM and it supported about 10 simultaneous users. OK: this was the 1980s and it was a PDP-11 (16 bit machine), but how times have changed!
BTW: Mb means megabit, MB means megabyte.
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I installed my first Linux (Debian 2.1 slink) on a PC with 4Mb RAM and it ran well, although it had no web browsers to speak of.
4GB has been insufficient for many years now (Score:5, Interesting)
The truth is that these requirements should have been updated years ago, as 4 GB has been insufficient for at least a decade unless you never use web browsers or modern applications using CEF (Chrome Embedded Framework).
The fact that Windows 11 still "requires" 4 GB of RAM is ridiculous. I recently installed Windows 11 from scratch with no OEM junk, and only installed the Intel GPU driver. On boot, the system RAM usage was around 5.9 GB with no applications running except obviously Windows Task Manager and Windows Explorer. This is all thanks to the PhiSilica Windows AI components that are now pre-installed automatically, as well as the WorkloadsSessionHost.exe application that runs at all times.
Took me quite a while to delete all this junk and reduce memory usage to just below 4 GB, which still sounds crazy. 6 gigs of RAM wasted just to show your desktop (as most Windows users will never get to the bottom of it), that's what we are dealing in 2026.
Re:4GB has been insufficient for many years now (Score:5, Informative)
Web browsers are absolute hogs, and, in part, that's because web sites are absolute hogs. Web sites are now full-blown applications that were written without regard to memory footprint or efficiency. I blame the developers who write their code on lovely, large, powerful machines (because devs should get good tools, I get that), but then don't suffer the pain of running them on perfectly good 8 GB laptops that *were* top-of-the line 10 years ago, but are now on eBay for $100. MS Teams is a perfect example of this. What a steaming pile of crap. My favored laptop is said machine, favored because of the combination of ultra-light weight and eminently portable size, and zoom works just fine on it, but teams is unusable. Slack is OK, if that's nearly the only web site you're visiting. Eight frelling GB to run a glorified chat room.
The thing that gets my goat, however, is that the laptop I used in the late 1990s was about the same form factor as this one, had 64 MB (yes, MB) of main memory, and booted up Linux back then just about as fast. If memory serves, the system took about 2 MB, once up. The CPU clock on that machine was in the 100 MHz range. Even not counting for the massive architectural improvements, my 2010s-era laptop should boot an order of magnitude faster. It does not.
Why? Because a long time ago, it became OK to include vast numbers of libraries because programmers were too lazy to implement something on their own, so you got 4, 5, 6 or more layers of abstraction, as each library recursively calls packages only slightly lower-level to achieve its goals. I fear that with AI coding, it will only get worse.
And don't get me started on the massive performance regression that so-called modern languages represent, even when compiled. Hell in a handbasket? Yes. Because CPU cycles are stupidly cheap now, and we don't have to work hard to eke out every bit of performance, so we don't bother.
Re: 4GB has been insufficient for many years now (Score:4, Interesting)
What if AI coding goes the other way?
AI is good at writing tons of code. We might actually move away from layers of libraries if AI directly includes all the support functions we've been too lazy to rewrite.
AI, using its training on all those libraries, might end up in-lining only the parts of the libraries that are needed.
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What if? In my experience AI generated code is primarily sloppy, lengthy python that includes so many libraries no single person could know all of them well enough to peoperly review the code.
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Interesting proposition. Have it write a browser in assembly.
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I have not seen AI code that is *more* efficient than human code, yet. I have seen AI write efficient, compact code when pressed, very, very hard to do so, but only then. Otherwise, in my hands, and those of my developer colleagues, AI produces mostly correct, but inefficient, verbose code.
Could that change? Sure, I suppose. But right now it is not the case, and the value system that is driving auto-generated code (i.e., the training set of extant code), does not put a premium on efficiency.
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I'm on Ubuntu 26.04, writing this using Firefox and I am currently using little under 2 GB of my RAM (16 GB in total). I'm not sure how much is used during the boot.
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Look on the shitty side.
Microsoft in response could fire up an American memory manufacturing plant.
That does nothing but soldered-on Microsoft-licensed WinMemory for exclusive use on Microsoft systems.
Don't worry. The Microsoft desktop tax in your corporate paycheck will be small at first.
I run Debian and i3 / Sway (Score:5, Interesting)
on all my machines. Once you get past the tiled window manager paradigm - if you've never used one before - you realize how fast and seamless it is, and it truly is the least common denominator in terms of memory usage.
I left Mint (which is really a Ubuntu derivative) years ago, and now i3 / Sway let I have the same unified desktop on all my machines, fast or slow, new or old, and they all feel perfectly usable.
I highly recommend spending the time to create a i3 or Sway config file. It's well worth the effort and it's a one-off.
And if you just want to try i3 or Sway on your existing distro, install it and simply change the Window manager for your user in the display manager: it lives totally independently of whatever your currently use, so it's risk-free.
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The Macintosh could handle overlapping windows in 1984. Why would I EVER want tiled windows, or think that low RAM is an excuse for not having them?
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Overlapping windows was a stupid idea in the 1980s and is still just as stupid. Not that this has anything to do with memory footprint, of course.
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Overlapping windows are a solution to limited screen real estate, that enables to keep context on each view and at window sizes that conflict with side by side viewing. That said, without focus follows mouse, kwin move / raise lower/ resize without needing the window edge (typically using modifier keys), active window not forced to top, and similar features, its use quickly diminishes.
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I mostly run application fullscreen and switch between them. The only exception is when I'm comparing the content of two windows (in which case I tile horizontally or vertically) and file selection (floating).
When an application uses the entire screen without the window decorations needed in a regular window manager, a screen's limited real estate is in fact better used in a tiled window manager.
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Tiled windows don't solve a problem. They're just a different workflow. I've used both for decades and neither is inherently faster or better. It's just what you prefer.
At any rate, don't knock it till you try it.
Windows 11 RAM requirements (Score:3)
The OS is bloated with things you will likely never use, and the apps are ever-more frequently bloated themselves, running in inefficient Edge Webview processes.
If you want to have more than a couple of things running in Windows 11 and want to be sure it'll run smoothly, you're wise to target 32 GB now with a 512 GB SSD. If you know what you're doing and are willing to spend a lot of time ripping out the unnecessary parts you can get it to run with 4 GB of RAM, but even at today's elevated memory pricing it's not worth the effort.
unity (Score:2)
I used to like Ubuntu, but then the unity desktop happened. It was choppy even on a gaming laptop and I had never seen such a waste of desktop space. I left and never went back.
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There are so many other Linux distros, including derivatives of the main ones - RedHat, Debian, Arch, Slackware, and then, beyond them, several DE options aside from Gnome There's LX/QT, Razor QT, XFCE, WindowMaker, Hyperland, and one can even go w/ minimalist windowing DEs
Also, if one has 4GB of RAM or less, it's probably a good idea to stick to a 32-bit version of the OS, whichever it is
Different design (Score:3)
First of all, Ubuntu (Linux) reserves buffers “just in case” (for streams, files, etc.). This unused memory seems taken but it can actually be reclaimed at any time if needed. Was that taken into account?
Then, it seems Windows is built by stacking new features on top of old ones. For example, if you look at how updates work, to go from, say, version 15 to 20, it asks you to update to 16, then 17 it can’t jump directly from 15 to 20, and often a reboot is required between two updates. It’s almost as if no one at Microsoft wants to maintain the older parts of the system anymore. It’s very likely that a good number of memory allocations would no longer be necessary if the older layers were removed or reworked. I’d be really surprised if, when comparing RAM usage between a freshly booted Ubuntu and Windows system (with no applications running), Ubuntu ended up using more.
everything has been bloated for a while (Score:2)
It's why I daily drive Alpine Linux, and use dwm as the window manager just so I can leave the memory to my applications.
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Russians burning down their own shopping centers for the insurance money again.
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Relevance?
Neon (Score:2)
Try KDE Neon instead. It's Ubuntu LTS with newest KDE.
4GB (Score:2)
I have lots of older machines with 4GB of RAM running the latest Linux Mint and perform just fine with Cinnamon + Firefox + LibreOffice for casual use and browsing (as long as it is an SSD). The majority of RAM is eaten by whatever web browser you are using and by how much. That is what will usually dictate your RAM requirements under Linux far more than the OS (unless you are gaming or doing something major like video editing).
4GB is a bit lean, and has been, so I do agree 6GB is more realistic. But run
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In either case, if one only has 4GB of RAM, just stick w/ the 32-bit version of the OS
I can run Ubuntu just fine with 8 gigs of RAM (Score:2)
If you give Windows 11 less than 16 GB you might as well not bother booting it. It is painfully slow and that's why you're not seeing 8 GB Windows laptops even though apple is out there selling in 8 GB laptop that's threatening the entire industry.
And honestly you really really want 32 GB for Windows 11 and 64 GB wouldn't hurt. It's one of the reasons the Damned ram crisis is so bad. Microsoft guzzles RAM for their slop generators and monitoring software. As a consumer if you're stuck running Windows yo
With Linux, OS is not usually the issue (Score:3)
If you run a light desktop environment like XFCE or LXDE, 4GB is probably fine.
However, the instant you spin up a modern browser or office suite, you're cooked. It's the massive applications that are the problem on Linux, not the OS or desktop environment (if you pick a lightweight DE.)
The keyword is "run" (Score:2)
Windows 11 requires 4GB to "run". In my experience, MS defines "run" as "very low values of 'run'"
Multitasking requiring more memory? (Score:2)
Let's see...Microware OS9 did real-time multitasked with 64k, and RT68 did it with a few thousand bytes on the MC6800. Ref: [1]https://github.com/linuxha/RT6... [github.com] and [2]https://github.com/nitros9proj... [github.com]
[1] https://github.com/linuxha/RT68mx
[2] https://github.com/nitros9project/nitros9
Anwser: No (Score:4, Informative)
"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
Re: (Score:2)
I wish we could call a moratorium on it. That along with mentioning tulips and bitcoin.
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Ahh yess. I too had learned this several decades ago.