A rant about Official documentation & MS & min.specs

[Jonathan Jesse]

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 :)****
>
> ** **
>
> --
> ubuntu-doc mailing list
> ubuntu-doc at lists.ubuntu.com
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-doc
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-doc/attachments/20120530/bb33451b/attachment-0001.html>