[TEAM] Modifying the minimum required RAM

[Pasi Lallinaho]

Canonical developers do not benchmark or run any regular testing on 
Xubuntu; this is not their work. Whether they do that for Ubuntu, I 
don't know. To be exact, Canonical "only" offers the infrastructure for 
Xubuntu.

If there are volunteers who are willing to set up a benchmarking 
process, run the benchmarks and ideally work on improving code in order 
to succeed better in the benchmarks, we're totally welcoming them.

I haven't run Xubuntu on low-memory (virtual) machines lately, so I have 
no idea what the usability is below 2GB RAM, but I'm pretty sure it's 
usable.

Setting the minimum any higher than the "acceptable" doesn't make any 
sense. If we consider 1GB memory bringing an acceptable experience but 
set the minimum to 2GB, we could potentially turn out people with just 
1GB memory – just by telling the minimum is 2GB. In other words, by 
setting the minimum too high, we would put Xubuntu out of reach for some 
users only *socially* (as technically they could still run Xubuntu). 
This  is why the minimum should be as low as possible.

Ultimately smoothness and acceptable responsiveness is very subjective; 
this is why we have minimum and recommended. Maybe you're saying 
recommended should be 2GB; if the minimum is 1GB, this sounds sensible.

Cheers,
Pasi

On 2017-01-24 02:49, JMZ wrote:
> Do Canonical developers routinely benchmark xubuntu (and other 
> flavors) against a Windows or Mac OSX version?  In other words, should 
> the recommended xubuntu RAM size be sufficient to run programs at a 
> speed similar to the memory-hungry programs on a Windows or Mac box 
> (Office, Internet Exploder, etc.)?  For xubuntu, I'm thinking of the 
> Firefox, Thunderbird, and LibreOffice triad in particular.  As 
> flocculant wrote, 1024 MB should be the very minimum.  I would say 
> 2048 MB should be the minimum, but that would place xubuntu out of the 
> reach of many computer users globally.
>
> Jordan
>
>
> On 01/23/2017 06:29 PM, Pasi Lallinaho wrote:
>> What is comfortable is definitely subjective, but I think the minimum 
>> system requirements should reflect an environment where you run one 
>> resource-intensive application at a time at most. Or in other words, 
>> you shouldn't expect to be able to edit high quality video and watch 
>> another at the same time smoothly with the minimum requirements. 
>> However, you should be able to be somwhat productive with your work 
>> with those resources.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Pasi
>>
>
>

-- 
Pasi Lallinaho (knome)                    › http://open.knome.fi/
Xubuntu Website Lead & Council member     › http://xubuntu.org/
Shimmer Project co-founder                › http://shimmerproject.org/
Ubuntu member