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Comment by oweiler | Hacker News Reader

How feasible would it be to run a current Ubuntu on an older i5 with 4GB of RAM?

That IS my daily driver. A quad-core i5, but I can't imagine a dual core struggling that much. 4GB of ram is fine for any linux distro itself but might not be good enough for a browser-centeric workflow. I get around that by using extensions like Tab-Discard or TheGreatSuspender to "pause" unused tabs.

Using a userland oom-killer does help a lot with deadlock situations (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22833471)

I wouldn't still recommend Gnome (Default Ubuntu), any other desktop would be lighter on RAM and CPU. KDE, MATE, or Budgie are all great.

I do have a speedy SSD though, when I was on my HDD the pill was quite harder to swallow.

This has been my experience as well. I do a lot of work on a computer running 18.04 with an i5-5300U (2 core, 4 thread), and the change between having an SSD instead of an HDD was probably the single largest performance improvement I've had because of a component change.

Linux works fine on that little RAM, but if it's an older machine, you should check out the price to upgrade. Spending $30 on 8GB would be a huge quality of life improvement.

At 4gb, I'd also look at lubuntu. The UI uses less RAM than Gnome and at that amount of RAM, 1-200MB is significant (plus, LXDE uses less CPU power too). I actually run i3 on a lot of older systems to save even more (but you'll have to learn how to using tiling systems -- not hard, but something more to learn nonetheless).

I just tried out both Ubuntu (gnome) and Mint (Cinnamon) on a 2015 MacBook Air, dual core i5 with 4 GB RAM. Mint was noticeably snappier - I really didn't enjoy Ubuntu, but a lighter desktop will probably make the difference.

Another comment talked about the RPi 4's capabilities, but mine had multi-second input lag running a fresh install of Ubuntu/Gnome on a single 4k screen.

RPi4 had significant, hardware-based performance issues in v1 of the board...

Do you have any links to this? I know about the USB-PD issue which they fixed in v1.2, but that's about it.

I think it was all bound to this - power issues make weird quirks throughout the system.

The difference is astounding in virtualbox. Ubuntu Gnome is nearly unusable- mint works pretty well. Using i3 for Ubuntu helps quite a bit.

With i3 (no GNOME elements at all, and precious little desktop environment stuff), I think my old 1920×1080 laptop tended to idle at using around 60MB of RAM. With 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD, I never set up swap, and over the course of four years or so this only bit me about three times, and I spent a lot of that time running two substantial Firefox sessions, a 2GB RAM VirtualBox VM and a handful of other things like urxvt, Inkscape and Chrome all at once.

What I love about linux is that we have the option of doing this. My main machine in my office is from 2009- 4GB RAM, linux mint and fluxbox. It's time to upgrade as I've gotten away a bit from slinging 1s and 0s but damn- still does a job for that.

Similar experience for me, tried to enjoy Ubuntu but Mint comes up more polished and, especially when using the dedicated XFCE release, much faster than default Ubuntu. Still worth doing the basics in terms of stopping services not needed for desktop/laptop use. I ended up removing 8 (!) resident services that were all of no use to me - tadaa, more RAM and responsiveness gained.

Note, I used: "systemctl list-unit-files --type=service | grep enabled" to find all enabled services easily and then: "systemd-analyze" for basic timing analysis

From maybe 2015 to 2017 I used an i3 (I forget the clockspeed) dual core processor with 4 gigs of ram daily working as a web developer. It wasn't even on an ssd. It depends on the type of work but for what I was doing it was fast enough.

Granted I was using Mint with the Cinnamon desktop but i'm sure Gnome with Ubuntu would have been fine too.

I installed Windows 10 on it for a few days to try it out and the difference was night and day. The laptop would pause for about a second every maybe 15 seconds or so, which wasn't a thing on Linux.

Should run fine, especially if you use an SSD. You're free to use any of the lightweight desktop environments (lxde, xfce, mate, etc.). The remainder depends on your workload/usecase wrt. to mainly RAM-requirements for tabbed browsing (or electron apps).

The RaspberryPi 4 also only has up to 4GB of RAM and is capable of driving 2 4K screens.

Running LXLE (essentially tweaked Lubuntu) exactly on that, and it FLIES. A SSD disk also helps a lot.

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