Ubuntu Linux raises minimum system memory requirements by 50% — requirements bumped to 6GB of RAM, previously raised from 1GB to 4GB in 2018
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/operating-systems/ubunto-linux-raises-minimum-system-requirements-to-6gb-of-ram-it-was-previously-raised-from-1gb-to-4gb-in-2018Open linkView original on lemmy.nz565
Comments200
IN THIS ECONOMY????
Worst timing for sure
can no longer say Linux is free
This is not Linux, this is Ubuntu, you can run Linux on the map on the back of a cereal box.
was trying to reference the minimum specs meme for Linux that goes like "Linux: memory (optional)"
I know, right? Read the room!
That's a short and spiffy summation of the article.
Please everyone read or at least skim articles before posting. The article literally says, that it's "an honest bump" to allow typical usage like web browsing and multitasking.
NEVER!
I bet your comment said something, so I upvoted it
But that requires actually READING 😖 /j
Downvoted, textwall!
/j
Tldr pls?
🔻
Web browsing is the real murder here.. and i dont want to know how much memory is solely spent on ads
The week after GDPR went into effect was amazing. Almost nobody was ready, so they just turned off all their ads and tracking for European IPs while they figured it out. Pages loaded pretty much instantly.
None if you use a good adblocker, like you should be doing.
I thought ad blockers just blocked ads from showing, not that they stopped them from being downloaded...
No, if it's a good blocker it's blocking all requests and connections to wherever the ads are being served from. There's usually ALSO a level of cosmetic filtering for things that get past the blocklist or can't be properly filtered because they're coming from the same server as stuff you actually want to see, but with ublock origin set to strict and noscript set to allow only whitelisted sites, my page load times are way faster. Sometimes a shitty webpage will still 'wait around' for a second to try and get a connection from an ad site but it's not loading anything into memory.
I'm concerned about in-system bloat because I read the linked article.
The desktop itself isn't the only reason that you need more RAM, but it's definitely one of them.
But that's not honest.
Ubuntu's default browser, and other apps, are snap-based. They take significantly more resourced than their Debian counterparts.
They don't take significantly more RAM
If a snap is bundled with it's own dependencies (the point of snap), those dependency libraries are not loaded into shared memory. Multiple apps that would typically share a loaded dependency must now each load them into RAM.
so use a lighter-weight de (xfce, lxqt, budgie), and don't go crazy with brower tabs or open applications, and you'll be ok.. like you're probably already doing now if you've got a 'marginal' pc.
Correct.
I totally get it but with the current rampocalypse I'd delay it just for the optics alone
Might as well bump it to 64 GB and an LLM chip since in 5 years' time people might like Copilot & Friends spying a bit less on them.
They’re raising it because of RAM needs of browsers and GNOME.
If you’re a shell nerd like me, you’ll still be fine running it on a potato.
It's an illuminating experience to go to a store with Apple computers with 8GB of RAM on display, and browse to a RAM-heavy unoptimized website like YouTube or even Reddit now.
Open a few tabs.
Open a dozen.
You'd be surprised what a decently coded OS can pull off without compromising on the visuals.
This is something people who call themselves tech nerds often don't understand, they only seem understand "bigger number better!". I have a vastly more enjoyable experience with a Mac than most Windows machines, (for many reasons, but most importantly for what you said).
Bigger is always better. For hardware.
On the other hand, less is always more for software.
It’s not size that matters but how you use it
That's not what they tell me. Heheheheh!
I used to believe this too, and unfortunately my experience on Linux kind of backed this up. I assumed that it would always be features = resource usage. XFCE is light because it's missing things. GNOME is heavy because it has good window management and keyboard shortcuts. Windows 10 is heavy for the same reasons as GNOME.
The trueism kind of works if nothing else changes, but in this case, there's no reason the codebase between Windows, Linux, and Mac would be the same.
Or webbrowser for that matter.
I always thought Gnome 3 was bloated.
Gnome 3 was a fad anyway
I switched to Mate for a while at the time, but then realised I liked XFCE even more.
A full potato? Lol, when I was young I had nothing but a french fry, scavenged from a McDonald's bin.
You had McDonalds? That was just a farm in my day. Eee-eye-eee-eye-oh!
Nah, my village just had the bin
Great move in these times where RAM is cheap and widely available
That dog is so dead by now
A dog dies twice. The first time is when its soul leaves its body, and the second time is when the meme of it is posted the last time.
what the dog doin
Canonical has never been accused of being able to read the room.
Canonical is incompetent in general
I mean they didn't go "well, let's just use 2GB more RAM now". They looked at the pre-release, and judged that for a good experience you should have 6GB. Chances are that resource consumption of 25.10 hasn't been very different in practice.
See https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/24934365
If you're strugging to afford an 8GB RAM chip, you may want to reconsider some of your life choices. Even with current market prices.
Poverty = life choices is the most reddit I've seen in Lemmy in a long while
No doubt the two aren't always connected, but in the US at least, 8gb isnt exactly breaking the average American household's bank. And if it is, yeah I'd argue they're doing something wrong in their decisions. One could mow a few lawns and have enough cash to keep up with the modern requirements of an OS.
"No doubt they are always connected but I double down anyway".
Now that's not just reddit, thats Fox News levels disconnect with reality.
Never thought I'd see "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" being used to defend inflated RAM prices, it's getting wild over here
The median daily income in the USA is 70$ https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income
According to T Mobile the average phone bill per month in the USA is 156$.
https://www.t-mobile.com/dialed-in/wireless/average-phone-bill-per-month
On newegg you can buy 8TV ram for $15.76 https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=RAM+8gb&Submit=ENE&pageTitle=RAM+8gb&Order=1
So yes, he's fucking right. Most people in the USA can afford 8GB RAM and if they cannot, they should consider looking into their expenditures.
I'm speaking American since you're quoting Fox News... Because it seems you're so self aware you forgot other countries exist. But that's just you're average Lemmy user "I'm more woke than you" kind of bullshit.
Fucking hell you people are so tiring. Nobody supports anything going against its own world view. You make me cringe so fucking much.
WTF you gonna do with PC3 ram, you have a good supply of ancient hardware or something?
Run ubuntu.
Average phone bill per month is 156$? Wtf do u have to do to get such a high phone bill lol
that's probably per 'household' not 'per line' or 'per person'.
Dont ask me idk
I'm quoting Fox because the other mentioned US. Blame them for US centrism, but then please update your incomes and costs to somewhere like Somalia, or even Greece. But that would be too woke or something?
Even if most people can, that doesn't mean that if you can't is because of bad decisions. That means being homeless is because of bad decisions. That means that those already on debt for medical issues made a bad decision.
For a lot of people spending those 16 dollars on RAM is the bad decision.
BTW, median income is absurd. You can have income and still spend on living expenses more than you earn. Now please tell me people needs to move to rural Ohio to maw grass to buy 8 gigs of RAM.
Edit: somehow I've struck a nerve with people from programing.dev who created the account on the same day, never commented anything and saw my comment within a few minutes of one another. I think I've struck a nerve :)
https://lemvotes.org/comment/lemmy.world/comment/23020915
What a fucking dumb hill to die on when factually proven wrong.
JFC. Zero self awareness here. Peak fucking American.
Most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Surviving off creditcards and buy now pay later.
Something tells me you don’t exactly have your finger on the pulse of “average” America.
Fuck out of here with this bullshit
It's not the one thing that's gone to hell. rent is on it's way up all over the world, unemployment is way up, food costs are up. Ram, SSD, Gas, Electricity. Over the past year, most things have gotten more expensive. Evevrything has gone up except salaries.
Transport costs are about to skyrocket. That'll add several more percent on everything.
From an indie dev standpoint, maybe you're just insulated more than most.
You’re right. I’m a developer making great money and I dont want to pay these prices. I should have stayed in retail so it would never even be an option to consider.
I don't immediately hate it. It's been a while since any laptops/prebuilds shipped with less than 8 GB, and there's distros out there far better suited to running on low power or legacy hardware.
Yeah my old ass laptop as 16GB so this is a non issue.
My older-ass laptop has 2GB, so it's kind of an issue for me.
(But I never attempted to put Ubuntu on that in the first place. It's running a much older, purpose-built version of Linux.)
i'm not even recommending 8gb laptops to most users anymore.. especially not ones with soldered ram that are stuck with only that.
In this economy?
So basically the system requirements of Chrome.
"HERE'S A NICKLE, KID. GET YOURSELF A BETTER COMPUTER."
20 years ago when Scott Adams was still a moderately sane human.
Just use Debian
Or arch
I use arch myself but I don't think it's a good alternative top Ubuntu
or if you can't get that to go (i had some hardware support issues) look to MX Linux or Linux Mint XFCE
Mint is based on Ubuntu.
yes but Linux Mint XFCE doesn't use all the heavy weight sytems that mean Ubuntu desktop needs 6 GB ram. for that matter, Xubuntu will, too, but fuck canonical.
however, as much as i loathe canonical i'm not gonna attract people to more secure from bullshit solutions if i'm net willing to meet them where they are. i'd rather we all be on debian however if even i can't get my laptop to work properly with it, i'm gonna direct some people to mint just to get them a little farther afield.
LMDE is based on Debian.
Wow, it needs more RAM than Windows!
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-specifications
Wow those min specs are pure bullshit. Sure you can run the OS - oh, did you want to do anything else with your PC? Good luck
Funny enough, I installed Win11 on a friend's HP convertible laptop today.
A 2GHz i3 and 4GB RAM, and it was still entirely usable. Not powerful by any means, but a fine socials browser, YouTube viewer, and document writer.
I'd have preferred to put Debian on it, but it wasn't my call, so I did as requested.
Strangely, that really does not narrow down which processor it is to me.
Cheap shit from 2014.
I just put mint on the same laptop from 2014 that you're talking about. My intent is to use it as something with more real estate than a phone when lounging around. Replaced battery, fan, and replaced spinning rust with a spare SSD. Last week upgraded the ram to 16gb ($40ish on Amazon for ddr3l!!). Only reason I upgraded it was because Firefox would occasionally stutter on scrolling.
Note the spec increase in Ubuntu is partially attributed to GNOME, which is also part of just running the OS before you even open anything.
No no it doesn't. It's spec acknowledges that in addition to your OS you also run applications.
OK, but oppose to Windows, you can run Ubuntu 24 until 2029. I don't think many will use a 4 GB notebook (as a notebook and not as a Debian server) beyond that time.
I'm using my 2016 Chromebook with 2GB until it literally dies. (Sucker has 16+ hours of battery life. Pretty nice, actually!)
Last time i checked they still sell a RPi with less than 4GB of ram.
Ubuntu (at least the default wm) runs like shit on rpi. I use Ubuntu everywhere but for small machines I typically find something specific for it.
Sure, but my point was more they still currently sell devices with less than 4GB of RAM so it seems reasonable to foresee people still using them in 2 1/2 years.
Me with 16 GB on my computer
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
That's not an argument for me, because less RAM usage by the operating system leaves you with more resources left for your applications and programms.
That's pretty much what a browser needs these days.
Reject modernity. Embrace lynx browser from terminal.
Gemini protocol is pretty good and minimal. But very little usage unfortunately.
Fun thing, I just booted up an old computer. Started right up. It had Ubuntu 11.10 on it.
Now, I obviously didn't connect the thing to the Internet. Updates would have probably failed hard. Not because it's missing over a decade of updates so there might be some complications on that front, but because it's a Pentium III with Definitely Not Even a Gigabyte of memory. (Oh and a Nvidia GeForce 2 MX. I'm pretty sure that's not supported by... any driver any more.)
Clone the hard drive and see what happens!
I'm putting money on what we in the business technically refer to as "complete pants shitting"
Use Debian if you want a system like Ubuntu that isn't full of Canonical's corporate shit. Ubuntu is based on Debian.
Would lmde be as good?
Yeah, LMDE is pretty good. I used it for a couple of years during my rage-against-Ubuntu phase.
Honestly, dont take anyones recommendation. It takes 10 minutes to create a bootable USB for a Linux distro once you get the hang of it. Try a handful of different “easy” distros and desktops on a Saturday morning and pick one that seems to work well on your computer and that you find you like. What you find intuitive isnt necessarily good for another, etc. A little time invested in shopping will pay off later (which is true for a lot of things).
This doesn't seem so bad, though. 2 GB more in about 10 years is pretty reasonable in terms of an increase.
It's not like they doubled it.
no it is not reasonable. What the hell do they need an extra 2gb for? What the hell is the operating system taking up that much resources for?
My first pc needed 4MiB of ram for the os. Why does this need 1536x as much to provide.... not much else tbh?
Ubuntu is the Windows of Linux.
It's getting more and more bloated with unnecessary and unwanted things, because of canonicals bad management decisions. They seemingly care more about "business" rather than users.
I’m not a fan, but thats extreme. The Ubuntu desktop will boot to the DE on half a gig of ram, and can open basic desktop apps with 1 or 2. Its the websites, containered apps, and more complex applications that Ubuntu is worried about UX disappointment from naive users (which is their segment). Windows 11 requires many times that just to get to a desktop and open a text file in notepad. They are not the same.
According to the article linked in the article, it's not that the operating system itself is more demanding, but more that the DE, and Browsers/Websites are more demanding now.
It feels like that Canonical basically needs to do the games thing of having a set of minimum specs for Ubuntu to run at all, and a recommend specs for Ubuntu to run well. Canonically basically bumped up the latter, but it's being taken as the former.
I mean the headline in your linked article literally calls it the 'minimum system requirements' not 'reccomended'. Games have had two sets of requirements for decades, I don't see why they couldn't do the same. Regardless if you need to run Linux on older/less powerful hardware there's much better choices than Ubuntu, which is designed to be as beginner-friendly as possible at the cost of performance and customizability as is, so in their case I guess it kinda makes sense to dumb it down.
Feel free to stay on DOS gramps
It seems to imply that software has gotten way worse in the last 10 years.
All of the default software that comes with the Ubuntu desktop will run reasonably well with 2Gb. Its the websites and electon apps (i.e., websites) that will make it swap. That and modern users that want to keep dozens of programs or websites open -which users 10 or 20 years ago may have known not to do.
Worse is relative, a proportion of the requirement increase will be due to worse code, but much more will be for features to make the software more accessible to more people, and adding features without needing to remove old ones, neither of which are a bad thing, otherwise everything would be a command line tool that removes options every few months and only has one way to use it
2GB is a lot
Modern UI development is such fucking shit. I have no idea why they went with all of these heavyweight shit frameworks.
Seriously, why do so many simple websites take more than and run worse that so many video games?
I thought part of the point was to have a website work more as an application: one update to a piece of information results in that information being near instantly updated across the site.
Then I looked into the angular stuff the UI people were working on and yeah.... something like 10 (costly) requests for the same exact fucking JSON. They were talking about doing caching on the frontend to optimize it. What are we even doing?!
Shocked i got this far without someone blaming snaps
i blame snaps
When I built my current rig a few years back (when I still used Windows and Photoshop), I said, "RAM is cheap enough, and more is better, but don't go overboard."
That's how I ended up with 64GB of RAM.
8GB was barely enough 10 years ago. That's when I switched to Arch+KDE. Then KDE started using more. memory.
More memory meaning? From 800Mb to 1GB? I'd say, for what plasma is, its ram usage is low.
The difference was hundreds of MB, but when you're working with 8GB every bit counts. At that time KDE had an edge over Gnome. At some point the difference wasn't there anymore.
I was rationing what software I had open so as to avoid hitting swap because that's when there's a noticeable lag. Gnome was worse at recovering from that.
If you want lightweight, KDE is not your best choice. LXQt and Xfce are actually intended for low resource usage.
I have a POS HP stream kicking around. Celeron and 2gb ram on it. It runs well with antix, I have used lxqt and xfce on it and been able to Google things and browse articles on the web, write word docs smoothly. I put kde plasma on it struggles now. Really it's time to retire that thing, but I like to occasionally distro hop on it and see what will run on that bunk hardware. So far antiX has been by far snappiest on that laptop, but it's not as pretty as KDE :c
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?
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.
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.
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.
I'm ok with this - lubuntu has my back.
Labubuntu
The next Hannah Montana Linux
My first Linux distro, on account of 2GB of RAM.
Meanwhile on my raspberrypi 4 running Ubuntu server:
And my tablet running stock Ubuntu:
Why not just debian if its a server?
Which desktop environments are you using on those systems?
None on servers, gnome on the tablet
Why is Ubuntu server even a thing? Desktop and server have quite the opposite requirements.
In post PC ownership cyberpunk dystopia well all be running slack
I would be but I misplaced the “a1” disk.
Assuming around USD $220 for a 16GB kit of DDR5, it now costs $27.50 more to run Ubuntu.
Really unfortunate seeing GNOME is part of the problem here. Linux desktop environments shouldn't need to be tied to large RAM requirements, never mind increasing ones, for basic functionality. For example, the Start menu key was introduced by Microsoft in Windows 95, but this toggle still isn't available in most "light" desktop environments like XFCE.
The MacBook Neo, of all things, is chomping at the heels of the idea that pretty, feature-rich OSes need a lot of hardware to function.
I found a lot of flawed measurements which ended up measuring different things. This seems like a fairly respectable measurement even for being a few years old
https://itvision.altervista.org/linux-desktop-environments-system-usage.html
Simple environments like xfce or mate under X11 are around 600 MB. Gnome X 1300MB Gnome Wayland 1400. Seems pretty clear that gnome is a significant factor in the increase on the other hand most machines now come with 8-16
But one of the key points of Gnome is reduced functionality?
If you don't like GNOME, Ubuntu officially supports other, less resource-intensive DEs, like Lubuntu, Kubuntu or Xubuntu
I would prefer something that's light without compromising on things that Microsoft figured out in the 90s and 2000s, and things that modern Apple computers can pull off now.
Apparently GNOME in particular is having a rough time in general, if other articles from
the same websiteomgubuntu are an indicator, but this seems to be a wider trend in desktop environmentsGnome is Javascript that runs in a webview. It's the same technology stack that we make fun of with the Win11 start menu.
It's shit technology. No wonder it requires so much RAM.
GNOME isn't exactly light, is it? And there's still a few more variants.
Do you actually feel like Windows or Mac are more responsive with the same RAM?
For Macs with 8GB RAM? Yes.
For Windows? It's way worse in my experience, even with debloat scripts, without opening a single thing.
The macbook Neo is a pretty powerful laptop, I wouldn't say its a champion of limited computation software success.
The specs are pretty good, but it's still only eight gigabytes of RAM total, and a phone processor, and seems optimized for comfort (cool case temperatures) over performance.
How will this affect Linux Mint, and should I make my move to Linux Mint: Debian Edition?
A lot (most) of it depends on the desktop environment you use. If you look for idle RAM usage compared by desktop environment you will see how drastic it is.
This kinda thing https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/linux-des-resource-usage-compared/70060
It's not that linear. Some background services will cache more things in RAM if memory usage is low and release it if total usage goes above a threshold, for example.
It doesn't. If you're doing anything in a web browser you're going to need that much RAM for a reasonable experience no matter what DE you're using. Ubuntu are just trying to set more realistic expectations.
it won't. ubuntu's announcement pertains to the extra demands of gnome, their flagship release, and it's default configuration.
mint doesn't ship a gnome spin, and cinnamon, mate and xfce are lighter-weight.. and mint is not dependent upon snaps, nor is it even configured oob with snap support enabled.
My Tandy Sensation required 256MB and everything worked fine.
I just checked Woot.com and you can get a refurbished Thinkpad with 16gb of RAM for $230. And there's a scratch and dent Dell netbook with 8gb of RAM for $60.
You can probably buy that thinkpad and sell used RAM for more
Maybe but you do have to keep in mind it's older. It's an 8th gen intel i5.
sorta funny as 16 is starting to feel cramped but I like headroom.
"Starting to"? 16GB is just a few tabs open for long enough.
Well thats the thing. For a tech person and compared to my peers I use pretty minimal stats. I only started feeling constrained by 8 like late teens and I was fine with 4 in the aughts. I guess my own personal ram usage level has been doubling although the aughts were insane. Having a 1 gig drive was a big deal coming into them and we had ram measured in kilobytes in a lot of our hosts. The pace of tech expansion in the first decade of the millenium is multiples of what we see after.
Yeah that's fair. My RAM usage is through the roof lately, but it pretty clearly happened when I switched to a multimonitor setup. I'm much more likely to have a lot of stuff in the background now because it's easier to have a lot open at the same time in the practical sense.
But I was lucky enough to grab a 64GB kit before prices went into the sky. Believe it or not, I was regularly up against the limit when I had 32GB.
I haven't run 16GB RAM SINCE MY 2012 Win8/Ubuntu PC. 3rd gen i7 w DDR3 1600MHz lol.
Now on 64GB 5600MHz and 12th gen i9. No upgrades any time soon.
What a bloat
Yeah, 6gb RAM is CRAZY! It's almost like you'd have to buy a computer that's at least 15 years old to get that!
What the hell is wrong with these people giving us free software for free and then having the audacity to expect us to pay more than $32 for a computer to run it!
THE NERVE!
Many people have 8 and 8 is going to be more popular again because of ai.
Only having 2gbs leftover to run everything isn't great.
Why would 2026 Ubuntu need 6x the RAM that 2018 Ubuntu needs?
Just how much bloat are they bloating, here?
They're basically saying "Our software doesn't need more RAM, but most of what you run on it does, so this is a more realistic expectation for what will make for a good experience."
Because websites and browsers have gotten way more bloated. If you don't need a web browser, you can get by with a lot less RAM.
And the default DE is a JS app that runs in a webview. You know, the same tech stack we make fun of the Win11 start menu for, but for the whole DE.
Snaps need that to be snappy.
It snaps off your ram sticks
They use a lot more disk do they actually use meaningfully more ram? Other than obviously inherently bloated web tech stuff?
I don't think so, but to be fair, I'm not using Ubuntu so I can't tell you first-hand
The question I have is whether Javascript will ever become faster, and not be a security vulnerability.
If it was sandboxed maybe it could use a lower level language like Golang or Julia, something still easy but far faster?
https://webassembly.org/
I mean, it's probably a good idea to have them higher, given that if someone wants to use it with some typical out-of-the-box desktop settings, that's not unreasonable, but while I haven't looked at the Ubuntu installer for a while, I strongly suspect that it permits you to do a minimal install, and that all the software in the Debian family is also there, so you can do a lightweight desktop based on Ubuntu.
My current desktop environment has sway, blueman-applet, waybar, and swaync-client running. I'm sure that you could replicate the same thing on an Ubuntu box. Sway is the big one there, at an RSS of 189MB (mostly 148MB of which is shared, probably essentially all use of shared libraries). That's the basic "desktop graphical environment" memory cost.
I use foot as a terminal (not in daemon mode, which would shrink memory further, though be less-amenable to use of multiple cores). That presently has 40 MB RSS, 33 of which are shared. It's running tmux, at 16MB RSS, 4 of which are shared. GNU screen, which I've also used and could get by on, would be lighter, but it has an annoying patch that causes it to take a bit before terminating.
Almost the only other graphical app I ever have active is Firefox, which is presently at an RSS of 887.1, of which 315MB is shared. That can change, based on what Firefox has open, but I think that use of a web browser is pretty much the norm everwhere, and if anything, the Firefox family is probably on the lighter side in 2026 compared to the main alternative of the Chrome family.
I'm pretty sure that one could run that same setup pretty comfortably on a computer from the late 1990s, especially if you have SSD swap available to handle any spikes in memory usage. Firefox would feel sluggish, but if you're talking memory usage...shrugs I've used an i3/Xorg-based variant of that on an eeePC that had 2GB of memory that I used mostly as a web-browser plus terminal thin client to a "real machine" to see if I could, did that for an extended period of time. Browser could feel sluggish on some websites, but other than that...shrugs.
Now, if you want to be, I don't know, playing some big 3D video game, then that is going to crank up the requirements on hardware. But that's going to be imposed by the game. It's not overhead from your basic graphical environment.
I'd also be pretty confident that you could replicate that setup using the same packages on any Debian-family system, and probably on pretty much any major Linux distro with a bit of tweaking to the installed packages.
Honestly, I suspect the main issue here is Gnome.
Despite their insistence on 'simplicity' and 'elegance', Gnome is by far the most resource-hungry DE that exists in the Linux ecosystem.
That, and maybe snap packages. It can't be good for RAM usage to have every app trying to load its own independent system of dependencies. That's got to lead to a lot of duplication in dependencies loaded into RAM.
Someone else in another comment linked to a memory comparison between desktop environments, and there KDE Plasma used the most memory, with GNOME in second place, but I think that the broader point here is that on Windows, you have one basic graphical shell that basically all desktop users are expected to have running. It's not completely impossible to hack up a Windows environment to avoid doing so, but it's a highly nonstandard configuration, and stuff is going to break.
Linux has a much broader range of options available, and those are first-class citizens. Some of them are considerably lighter on resource usage than others.
A lot of users aren't going to cobble together their own ideal environment the way I do, but there are "presets" of packages that are aimed specifically at being light on resource usage. XFCE has historically been one example; they were slow to move to Wayland, but it looks like they're doing it now. One doesn't have the sort of "the OS vendor is giving you one monolithic blob that you need to run" the way you do on Windows.
Ubuntu is the Windows 11 of Linux distros.
I'd say it's worse than Win 11 as a desktop distro
Let's not get crazy
I used Ubuntu in the past (2016-2018) and I'd rather go back to Windows then use that piece of shit ever again
But how will I run it on my 32bit laptop now? /s
But I demand my vibe coded AI slop programs run at half the speed of 30 year old software!