[intothemild]

Two things

First, it sounds like this 6gb requirement is more like a suggestion/recommendation than a requirement. I also am curious if it actually actively uses all 6gb. From my own usage of Linux over the years the OS itself isn't using that much ram, but the application is, which is almost always the browser.

Secondly. I haven't used Ubuntu desktop in years. So I have no real idea if this is something specific to them, but I do use Fedora, so I would imagine that the memory footprint cannot be too different. Whilst I could easily get away with <8gb ram, you really kind of don't want too if you're going to be doing anything heavier than web browsing or editing documents. Dev work? Or CAD, Design etc etc. But this isn't unique to Linux.

[sunshine-o]

I happened to install Fedora Silverblue on a computer a few days ago and looked quickly at the memory usage after boot: it was about 6gb ! I usually run Alpine or FreeBSD, so I thought: great that thing consumes 10x the RAM.

I believe Fedora and Ubuntu use about the same set of technologies: systemd, wayland, Gnome, etc. so it is about the same.

Apart from working out of the box I do not really know what those distros have and I don't. I just have to admit managing network interfaces is really easy in Gnome.

With the skyrocketing price of RAM this might finally be the year of the Linux desktop. But it is not gonna be Gnome I guess.

[heelix]

Ubuntu just raised the minimum RAM requirement from 4gb to 6. While it might have been possible to run anything with a GUI on 4, I can't imagine that is a good experience.

When they turned Centos into streams, I cut my workstation over to Ubuntu. It has been a reasonable replacement. Only real issues were when dual booting Win10 horked my grub and snap being unable to sort itself on occasion. When they release 26 as an LTS, I'm planning to update. You are spot on - the desktop itself is reasonably lean. 100+ tabs in Firefox... less so. Mind you, the amount of RAM in the workstations I'm using could buy a used car these days.

[hhh]

I don't really get it. I have ran fleets of thousands of devices running Chrome in a container on Ubuntu server, and it's a nice experience. It took a lot to make it nice, but once it was there it was rock solid. This was with 1GB ram on a Pi 3. When we swapped to Pi4, we just had thousands on gigabytes of ram and thousands of cpu cores unused.

[bee_rider]

Does Firefox really not unload the tabs in that case?

[foepys]

It does. You can also do it by hand via the right-click on tab menu