How much memory do I need to run Linux?

The simple answer is not much. But of course, it all depends. If you want to simply get an old computer up and running for, say, a student, you can get away with 4GB of RAM, but 8GB will give you more wiggle room. On my business laptop, I’m currently running 8GB, and I have things fairly finely tuned so that I typically don’t use much more than 5GB at a time.

However, if you want to run a full-featured desktop environment, like Gnome, with a lot of software, like Microsoft Teams, then you’ll want to go big. 16GB will get you there.

What is a desktop environment you wonder? It’s the window configuration that you use to interact with the operating system. (That sounds overly technical.) It’s the menu, it’s what the title bars look like, it’s what happens when you double click, right click, move or stack one window on top of another. And so on.

In the world of Linux, you can choose what kind of desktop environment you want. I use Gnome, because it has lots of features, such as integration of my calendars, support for screen gestures, and so forth. But Gnome might be overkill.

Let’s say you’re setting up a laptop for a student. You might try Xfce as a desktop environment. It has a much smaller memory footprint than Gnome, and it looks more or less like a familiar old Microsoft Windows environment. (Obviously, under the hood it operates entirely differently, but to anyone familiar with a Microsoft-style environment, the jump to Xfce isn’t huge.)

Generally, I can get Gnome running nicely using about 2GB of RAM. Xfce will be less (I don’t have a number off the top of my head), but you’ll still be using at least 1GB just to get the machine running.

You can save memory by shutting down services enabled by default, assuming you don’t use them. For example, I do not use the snapd service, which you can think of as a “Play Store” or something along those lines. So, I removed the snapd package from Ubuntu and saved myself a heap of memory.

Most of my work is browser-based, so I did a lot of experimenting with browsers. I’m using Ubuntu 21.04 currently (I prefer at this point in my life to install a full-featured system and pare it down, rather than build up the system I want from a simpler base (I’m looking at you Arch Linux).)

Firefox is the default browser in Ubuntu, and I like it very much. But for a bunch of my work, my employers developed Chrome extensions. Good news, there are two ways to run Chrome in Linux.

First, you can run Google’s version of Chrome, downloadable from their site.

Second, you can run Linux’s own Chromium, which is, more or less, Chrome without all the Google stuff attached to it. Chromium will run extensions from the Chrome store, so I had two choices.

Ultimately — and the purists will despise this — I chose Google’s Chrome. Ultimately, it came down to memory management. Chromium, I found, used a massive amount of memory for its password store, whereas, unexpectedly, Chrome did not. (Could I have rooted around under the hood and made Chromium stop doing that? Probably. Was it worth my time? No.)

In the end, even though Chrome gets called out as spyware in various corners of the internet, I’m so deep in with Google by now that I can’t see wasting my time on privacy purity. For example, whatever browser I use, I’ll have a gmail tab open. I have an Android phone. I search with Google. Yes. Yes, they have absorbed me. I am no longer pure.

The good news for the impure is that all of this stuff runs perfectly fine in Linux.

My employers use Microsoft Teams. I installed the native Linux app, and promptly uninstalled it. Perhaps it has features I’ll want to use in the future, but right now, for the job I’m doing, the browser supports everything I need. The Teams app consumes an incredible amount of resources, and installs a ppa (reference to a software repository) to keep itself up to date, and sets itself up to run absolutely constantly. Bugger that. Not interested.

(If you stick with me long enough, you’ll find that I have no use for anything Microsoft. As a writer, for example, I utterly despise Word. I think the window environment is rubbish. And I can’t understand why they don’t provide simple software to do the simplest of things. In short, I’ve never used Windows except in workplaces where I’ve been assigned a machine. But I digress. This is about memory.)

Let’s talk hard drive space. My laptop has 256GB, and that’s more than ample at this point in my life. I store all my media on a separate server. Documents and the like are all in the cloud. And a basic install of Ubuntu took less that 10GB.

If you have a need to store a lot of big files locally, then by all means go big. But to simply run Linux, you don’t need much. Give it a try and enjoy!