A rant about Official documentation & MS & min.specs

Fri Jun 8 10:15:07 UTC 2012

Hi :)
Welcome to the list!!  :D  It's good to see you join in and i am kinda very much on your side despite the way it might sound below.  
1.  We both (all) want Ubuntu to be more successful
2.  We appreciate it is pretty fantastic as it is at the moment.  

Server Edition is really a separate topic.  I was really only talking about the officially quoted min.spec. for the desktop.  

I agree that if one or 2 of the machines specs or even if the architecture happens to be favourable (thinking of the Raspberry here) then you can often get a machine working even if it is ridiculously low on 1 or 2 things.    However i think it is better to be realistic and cover 1 general case and then allow people to be pleasantly surprised.  At the moment the quoted min.specs wont work for most people looking at them and that generates unnecessary complaints and grumbles.  

I think the min.spec. page should point people to DistroWatch because there are plenty of alternative distros that would work on far lower specs.  The main advantage of Ubuntu is 
1.  the vast community and reaches into mainstream media
2.  amazingly fully functional
There is no need to try to squeeze it into a box it wont fit in.  The box it will fit in compares favourably with realistic min.specs of the main competitor.  

I do know that Ubuntu is a professional project with quite a few companies contributing to it's success.  However this is not widely known.  Ther is a lot of FUD out there that convinces people that community projects means hobbyists writing little bits here and there in there spare time.  Reality has nothing to do with public perception and that really annoys me a lot quite often.

Regards from
Tom :)

--- On Wed, 30/5/12, Conno Boel <conno.boel at xs4all.nl> wrote:

From: Conno Boel <conno.boel at xs4all.nl>
Subject: Re: A rant about Official documentation & MS & min.specs
To: "Jonathan Jesse" <jjesse at gmail.com>, "Doug Smythies" <dsmythies at telus.net>
Cc: ubuntu-doc at lists.ubuntu.com
Date: Wednesday, 30 May, 2012, 20:04

Hi all,

normally I just listen to the mails (or rather, 
read em), but now I just want to mark a few things:
as a first, An inexperienced User is not likely to use 
Ubuntu server version. I had some trouble with the server version when I 
first tried it, only after some "getting into linux" I got it 
right...

Also, my expirience is that when one of the 3 named 
variables is lacking, it will still work out... (like, less mem, or less HDD can 
be compensated by more mem or more swap) I don't know about the Processor, but i 
got 2 old solaris sparks here on wich I can test that if you guys would like 
that...

Lastly, Ubuntu is not really an Hobby-project, it's got 
canonical to back it up... so people won't really be like "Oh my, this is done 
by hobbyists O.o", even better, Dell and Asus sell (or at least they did at one 
point) 5-10% of their pre-build (dunno the exact word in 
english) systems (mainly the laptops) with Ubuntu already installed on 
it!

well, this is my first (rather small and ranty) 
contribution, hope you guys get some useable info from it!

greetings from the netherlands!

C.

From: Jonathan Jesse 
Sent: Wednesday, May 30, 2012 8:11 PM
To: Doug Smythies 
Cc: ubuntu-doc at lists.ubuntu.com 
Subject: Re: A rant about Official documentation & MS & 
min.specs

who defines these mim specs?  Some one from the Engineering 
team at Canonical or was it someone from the Unity team that says this is the 
min that Unity will run under? 

Needs to be "official" so just curious as to who officially creates these 
min specs?

On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 11:25 AM, Doug Smythies <dsmythies at telus.net> wrote:

  Hi,

  I will 
  only speak to Ubuntu server edition in this reply, as that is all that I 
  use.

  The 
  minimum specs are: 300 Mhz CPU and 128 Megabytes of RAM and 0.5 or 1 gigabyte 
  HD.

  As part 
  of the 12.04 release cycle, I tested these minimum requirements with a very 
  old 200Mhz, 128 Megabyte, 60 gigabyte ATA hard drive computer (it is hard 
  enough to find old ATA drives lying around, yet alone a 1 gigabyte 
  one).
  Actually, 
  only 18 months ago I retired the computer from being my main Ubuntu 
  server.
  Various 
  versions of 12.04 beta were tested. Yes, installation was slow and some things 
  are somewhat sluggish, but it worked fine.
  Very 
  late in the release cycle, there was an issue (bug 986654) that I am still 
  working on trying to confirm or deny if the root issue is because my system 
  does not meet minimum specs and/or if minimum specs need to be 
  changed.

  Myself, 
  I would not change server edition minimum specs beyond what is actually 
  required.

  ... 
  Doug

  From: ubuntu-doc-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com [mailto:ubuntu-doc-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com] On Behalf Of Tom 
  Davies
Sent: May-30-2012 01:30
To: ubuntu-doc at lists.ubuntu.com
Subject: A rant about 
  Official documentation & MS & min.specs

        Hi :)
Possibly it is too hot here and i'm having a 
        "bad hair day".  Please don't anyone take this personally it's just 
        a rant about the unfairness of the world in general 

<a rant 
        about official documentation>
Official documentation can be really 
        annoying.  The official page showing the "minimum specification" 
        that Ubuntu can run on is sooo low that almost none but the most 
        advanced users can get Ubuntu running at all let alone 
        satisfactorily.  Most people that start with Ubuntu are not 
        Gnu&Linux experts so they find that Ubuntu wont work on their 
        machine with 2Kb of Ram and then say that means that Ubuntu doesn't work 
        and that Gnu&Linux never works.  

Of course MS makes 
        outrageously low claims for Xp too but with that people don't expect it 
        to work unless they have far MORE than the min.spec.  For some 
        weird reason people expect Ubuntu to work with far less than the 
        min.spec.  

That adds to the general "blame the user" 
        attitude in the Windows world.  After all it's  corporate OS 
        right?  So it couldn't possibly go wrong unless the customer stuffs 
        it up could it?  Lol.  By contrast people don't expect a 
        "hobbyists, community thing" to work so if they do something really dumb 
        then they blame the project rather than themselves.  If it goes 
        wrong it proves to them what they had already decided before trying 
        it.  
</a rant about official documentation>

When i 
        first tried Ubuntu i somehow stumbled onto the community docs page and 
        despaired slightly that my machine was only just over the min.spec 
        quoted there.  So, I didn't think it stood a chance.  My 
        neighbour installed it and to my amazement it flew.

I think 
        giving people false expectations is damaging and we should really quote 
        min spec as something like this or higher
10 Gb hard-drive 
        space  (Xp quotes lower but most people know it's uncomfortable 
        with less than 30GB and 20% of that being free-space)
2 Gb Ram 
        (people will read that and then try it on machines with only 1Gb.  
        If we wrote 500Mb they expect it to work on 256Mb ram)
1.6 GHz cpu 
        (again people will try it on a lot less expecting it to 
        work)

Regards from
Tom 
:)

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