A rant about Official documentation & MS & min.specs

[Doug Smythies]

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 :)

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-doc/attachments/20120530/b56f5285/attachment.html>