Exactly - a desktop experience should track the current desktop hardware. If you have 512mb of ram and a pentium 4 then too bad. Let’s not hobble the future because of the past.

What about people who bought a low-to-mid range laptop last year? While 8G isn't .5G, it's still low enough that you'd quickly hit swap (a bloated modern browser + multimedia authoring tools)

Tracking "current" desktop hardware is a quick way to get yourself another vista.

Firstly 50MB isn't ".5G", it's 0.05GB (you're out by an order of magnitude).

You're point about not tracking current is relevant though....or at least it is for some domains. When it comes to multimedia authoring you do expect people to running at least current systems because multimedia authoring is hardware heavy processes thus professionals will invest in the hardware to support them. Even weirder is the expectation that you'd want to be running a hardware heavy web-browser while running your hardware heavy authoring tools on those modest systems. That feels like you're making some unfair demands tbh.

As for KDE5, that runs fine on older hardware. I have a 7 year old laptop and KDE flies.

> While 8G isn't .5G, it's still low enough that you'd quickly hit swap (a bloated modern browser + multimedia authoring tools)

High memory usage from a browser or multimedia authoring tools is not the fault or responsibility of the desktop environment?

Edit: Or was your point more that the desktop environment should use minimal memory so that the user can have a better experience with their applications? That makes sense, except in this case Ubuntu Studio explicitly states that it’s designed for powerful machines and not ones with more limited resources

If you bought a budget computer do you really expect it to be able to handle running even minor taxing applications. In my experience most people who are buying a budget laptop need a great web browsing experience and maybe an office suite (if they aren't using a cloud one already).

My guess is running a browser with Spotify or YouTube, some social networking tabs, and maybe google docs or office 365 word will not pose any issues.

FWIW I've been running KDE Neon on an older Intel NUC, sporting an i5-4250U and 8GB RAM. For normal usage like surfing the web, writing documents, file management, email and watching YouTube it has behaved very well.

Obviously the CPU is a bit anemic which is noticeable when you do CPU heavy stuff like watching non-h264 videos on YouTube, but otherwise it's been very smooth and functional.

There' no such thing as a "current desktop hardware" in 2020. Specs haven't been changing in like a decade.

That’s not really true, though desktop hardware hasn’t improved anywhere near as much as laptops, where the difference is very substantial. Computer hardware of equivalent cost or high-/low-endness has gotten quite a lot faster (and much more power-efficient); for many sorts of tasks similar CPUs will be four or more times as fast. But it’s really SSDs where the most obvious improvements have occurred, and for most practical computing terms, compare a fast and expensive HDD machine of ten years ago with a cheap SSD machine from now and the modern one will be waaaay faster.

Sample article doing some comparisons: https://www.techspot.com/article/1666-old-1000-cpu-vs-budget...

Yeah, a large reason Vista got lambasted so widely was because netbook form factors were gaining steam at the same time, and Microsoft had built it with the assumption that most new users would be using contemporary desktop-class machines. The old assumption that users would throw out their old equipment and upgrade to something in step with Moore's Law was no longer valid.

According to the steam hardware survey (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey) current desktop hardware is 8GB of RAM or less, that's what half of all users have. There are more people on 4GB or less than there are with with more than 16GB. Your machine is the statistical outlier here and shouldn't be catered to at the expense of everyone else.

Your current desktop hardware.

And you don’t need every desktop environment to handle every use case. If you have limited resources, run something like XFCE.

Amen. Stop fighting the last war.

In Ubuntu Studio's context, one would expect the typical user to have decent RAM as it caters for multimedia which needs a lot of RAM.

Ubuntu's minimum requirements for desktop users is 4GB RAM. I presume that an extra 50MB is acceptable.

This article is about Ubuntu Studio switching to KDE.

> For reference, Ubuntu Studio is created for more powerful computers, is not meant to run on low-powered or older hardware, and is not meant to give an old computer new life. For that reason, from our perspective, the RAM usage between the two desktops is nearly the same.

I'm still rocking a 7 year old Samsung Chronos with 8GB RAM and KDE5 flies.

There used to be a time when the real world footprint between KDE and XFCE was significant but that's not been the case in a long time.

These days the footprint of your average desktop chat client has dwarfed the difference in memory usage between most of the major desktop environments. So if you're looking for places to cut corners that would be the first place I'd suggest looking.

I'm using KDE (Kubuntu 20.04) on four laptops turning 10 this year. They are AMDs first gen APU, so they were nothing fancy when they came out. KDE runs just fine, with animations. Main thing to upgrade was an SSD for a really speedy setup.

That's the one upgrade (SSD) I did too.