Did I miss anything ? I just could not find the system requirements for Lubuntu 24.04, after searching on lubuntu.me and even through all internet.
4 Likes
As we announced back in 2018 (see https://lubuntu.me/taking-a-new-direction/), we have not provided minimal system requirements for many years.
I still use devices with 1GB of RAM on occasion, and do some QA testing [of Lubuntu] with a 2GB RAM box, however how I use those low-resource machines varies significantly if contrasted with how I use my current primary box with its 16GB of RAM… ie. the minimal specification makes little sense unless how used is taken into consideration.
Before I start an application on any box (esp. if 8GB or less of RAM) I consider what is already in RAM & thus what effect the additional app will have, what resources will be shared with existing apps, or additional libraries/toolkits that will be required [by the new app]. Minimal specifications cannot ‘capture’ this sort of detail, and anyone who can consider that, won’t need a minimal spec doc anyway (a list of what’s included gives everything required).
My view anyway (and note I was not involved in the decision to ‘drop’ minimal hardware requirements either; the decision just makes sense to me).
3 Likes
No system requirements anymore.
I think that focusing on minimum system requirements is a race to the bottom. It changes the focus to supporting the least usable, least common hardware rather than providing a lightweight solution for most situations.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the desire to keep perfectly good but old hardware working— it’s what brought me to Lubuntu 13 years ago. Still, a lot of old hardware is impractical to use for common tasks. Modern web apps alone can exhaust the memory on a lot of old hardware.
Some folks make a hobby out of making old hardware work, which I can appreciate. NetBSD on a VAX, for example, is a really impressive project. It might be fun to tinker with it on, say, a VAXStation 3100 but with a maximum of 32MB of RAM, you’d be lucky to get X running. It’s fun, but not very usable.
A relatively new addition to the museum-class is the 32 bit processor. Few Linux distros support these anymore. Lubuntu stopped after 18.10. Previous to this, we had worked very hard to ensure support. But it became harder and harder, especially since the hardware wasn’t that common and was limited on resources. So again, not very usable. And nowhere near as fun as the VAX. Worse yet, unlike the VAX, owners of 32 bit machines expected them to work perfectly.
There is one clear system requirement then: an amd64 processor. Among all the hardware using them is a wide range of possibilities. So naturally one wants to know whether or not the hardware they have works. So we should publish minimum system requirements.
There is only problem: they are minimum system requirements to what? Just being able to boot? Only being able to run a single application at a time? Being able to run Firefox in only one tab with no JavaScript? The list goes on. At what point do we decide the system is minimally usable? It’s because of this ambiguity that we do not publish system requirements.
What we will continue to do, however, is choose to keep things as lightweight as possible, at least as long as it doesn’t force the majority of users to sacrifice usability.
5 Likes
Got it and thank you all.
1 Like
Not sure what happened and if it was a goal…
… but a semi-abandoned 15+yo PC where I used to run 18.04 (still LXDE) reasonably well …
… has become a speed demon on 22.04 (LXQt).
As if removing hardware requirements (semantically) had reaxed hardware requirements (factually).
It was Pentium dualcore 2.4GHs, 2GB PC6400 at 800MHz FSB, 160GB HDD.
This inspired me to make better use of it by paying more attention to roadkill hardware. Now it has
- a returned 64GB SSD boot drive (a few bad sectors, I stressed the heck out of it before declaring it stable)
- 3.2GHz dual core Pentium (literally plucked from curbside recycling, barely over 3h hours in a lawyer’s office)
- 500GB 7400rpm HDD (it’s first marriage was to the hdd above)
- and it’s now getting 8GB postconsumer RAM, massive overkill.
It’s now born again as a LAN file server, will soon get ssh over VPS for some tricks I need to do remotely. First test will likely be a traffic jam simulator, sounding an array of 3 car claxons from anywhere in the world.
3 Likes