I agree that the minimum memory requirement should be raised to 4 GB.
EDIT: I have to say that I had the recommended memory in mind, not the minimum one.
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Currently there are still many net-tops and net-books with hardware maximal 2G of RAM, so it is great that their users can’t use JavaScript based glossy slow GNOME Shell.
Such users will use normal traditional feature-rich desktop as MATE DE or whole Ubuntu MATE flavor. Greek LTSP initiative is wide-auditory success story of using MATE in education.
As one of such users I can say thank you for development of modern resource hungry Ubuntu Desktop! 
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4 GB is well enough-4 GB on Windows 7 works well, but 8 on Windows 10 CAN get laggy.
So 4 GB will give you a SMALL and TINY wait, and I have seen that on Virtual Machines, so it should be raised to 4 GB of RAM.
Also for the disk space, 15 GB should work for people who wont really use Ubuntu a lot. 50 GB is for people who are just playing with Ubuntu and want to use it. 75 - 100 is if your people like me who are developers, or people just sticking with Ubuntu-for example, 100 GB/1000 GB on my new laptop (Dell Inspiron 15-3576) is Ubuntu, and the other 900 is full of Windows, and the EFI boot stuff.
But honestly, when I saw those recommendations, and I don’t really use 18.04, then those recommendations are honestly pretty sad.
Oh-and it roasts itself “Internet access is helpful”-you need the internet to pretty much install the operating system. Unless you want the ISO or whatever to contain 10 gigabytes of crap.
Minimum RAM spec should be 2GB for default Ubuntu. Anything lower than will be better served by other flavors.
I recommend at least 4GB of ram. I have some laptops like that running the latest Ubuntu desktop, and the performance isn’t really degraded.
I would definitely recommend either an SSD or a really fast HDD. Ubuntu desktop performs really badly on a small spinning disk. As an example, the loading spinners when you open an application or a file disapear before the program is loaded, making users think that nothing is happening.
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I agree. The bare minimum should be 2 GB and the recommendation 4 GB.
The base system will consume about 650 - 900 MB but just browsing (regardless of Chromium or Firefox) will use about 500 - 1000 additional MB with just some tabs open. The modern web takes its toll these days.
And I agree with the SSD. That should be recommended as well.
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That sounds like a bug, best filed with ubuntu-bug gnome-shell perhaps, if you could do that? Ubuntu should work flawlessly for all users and I don’t think its reasonable to recommend an SSD or fast HDD.
Why don’t you think so?
Because I didn’t think it was something required to run a modern operating system? But perhaps I’m wrong.
@jbicha - So we discussed this for a bit, and I guess we can now take the next step and make this happen, replacing the (IMO outdated) information provided in several locations.
How would you suggest to proceed from here?
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@tomreyn The initial post was about the download page, what other pages need to be updated?
(the tutorial on https://tutorials.ubuntu.com/tutorial/tutorial-install-ubuntu-desktop doesn’t have a RAM requirement for example)
also has the same list of specs found in the initial post.
@tomreyn if there are others, include this one and i’ll delete this post
Sorry, I hadn’t noticed those had been updated, yet, thanks for doing so.
So what else needs updating?
Just maybe the “Ubuntu Installation Guide” at https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/installation-guide/amd64/ch03s05.html (maybe also for other versions (s/stable/lts/) and architectures (s/amd64/.../) might need updating. However, this seems to be a generic guide listing the very minimum requirements, mostly duplicating (with different recommendations) the server installation guide at https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/serverguide/preparing-to-install.html - so maybe that’s not actually needed.
Maybe Release Notes (for 18.04?) in the Desktop section should discuss the change: wiki.ubuntu. com/BionicBeaver/ReleaseNotes - and maybe also the Bionic Upgrade Guide help.ubuntu. com/community/BionicUpgrades (though it does refer to the Release Notes). Sorry for having to break these links - I’m only allowed to have two links…
Finally, notifying Flavors about the change may proof useful, possibly triggering them to re-evaluate their recommendations which is probably not a bad thing in general.
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I opened a bug with the web team and they’ll be updating the memory requirement to 4GB. Thanks for raising this.
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Thank you very much, the download page has been updated in June.
I revisited https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/installation-guide/amd64/ch03s05.html today. This location (targeting the latest stable release, currently 19.04) discusses both (default) Desktop (gnome-shell) and server installations and provides minimum and recommended hardware specifications for these. It then goes beyond this and discusses possibly lower memory requirements on different desktop environments / Ubuntu flavours and different architectures.
I believe that the memory requirements and recommendations provided there are (if we assume they are for the default gnome-shell based desktop) also (much) too low and need to be raised to the values provided on the desktop and server ISO download pages.
It should also be noted that not all Pentium 4 CPUs supported Intel 64 - especially the lower frequency models such as the 1.3 GHz Willamette did not. Also, many of these were single core CPUs, several did not support hyper threading.
I have not actually tried but my gut feeling is that I would not want to try to run default 19.04 Desktop on any Pentium 4 CPU, even if it had 4 GB RAM and a dedicated graphics card. (And I’m neglecting all the other reasons we know today that those CPUs should no longer be used - energy, reliability, security concerns.)
Maybe a dual-core CPU such as Core2 Duo or even Core i3 should be listed as a minimum instead?
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That’s odd, it looks like that guide has been synced from Debian. I wonder if there were some Ubuntu changes which have been lost.
Who owns those guides, does anyone know?
It’s for Support reasons. Canonical doesn’t have enough people to support everything. For Canonical to commit to supporting One More Thing, some paperwork is required. (And a Security evaluation is just one part of that paperwork.)
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Did you two post on the wrong topic maybe? While it seems like an interesting discussion, this does not seem to add to the minimal hardware recommendations discussion (unless I’m missing something).
I swear that I posted in the Wayland thread. Strange.
It should have been there: https://community.ubuntu.com/t/wayland-for-19-10/10983/29
EDIT: moved the posts over there. And sorry.
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