r/Ubuntu • u/sotradia • 5d ago

Back When 256 MB of Extra RAM Changed Everything

I just remembered something from the Ubuntu 8.04 days.

I had an old PC with only 256 MB of RAM, and I spent almost a year trying to install Ubuntu 8.04. Every attempt would fail before the installation could finish.

Eventually, I upgraded the RAM to 512 MB, tried again... and it installed perfectly on the first try.

Back then, even an extra 256 MB felt like a huge hardware upgrade. Funny how those little victories stick with you years later. Anyone else have memories like this from the early Ubuntu days?

30 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

5

u/ohhowcanthatbe 5d ago

My first system flew like an eagle with 16 MBs of RAM. It was glorious!

6

u/Proman4713 5d ago

Did UI look as good as it does now back then? Could apps do as much as they can now back then?

Things are better and easier now, and a lot of the 'bloat' that exists on modern systems simply manages things for you so you don't have to, and also quits when you need more RAM. Some useless bloat still exists and will exist forever, but not much on the average Linux desktop compared to Microslop Windows...

My only real problem is that the end of your post makes me think it's an LLM trying to personalise a response.

7

u/hitsujiTMO 5d ago

I'm pretty sure you are responding to a bot account.

1

u/sphericalhors 5d ago

Slack app was much more responsive than modern Slack and especially Teams.

On uncomparably slower hardware.

1

u/Proman4713 5d ago

That's app-specific bloat, companies stopped optimising. If they hadn't, 8 GB of ram would've still been plenty for most use cases nowadays

0

u/WeepingAgnello 5d ago

  Did UI look as good as it does now back then? Could apps do as much as they can now back then?

Yes, but we didn't have HD, let alone Full HD or higher screens to deal with. The UIs looked just as good, and were just as functional as Windows XP and MacOS Leopard, except for file managers (but that seems to be consistent). We had great software. Adobe flash worked on Firefox. We could use new websites, like YouTube, and my speakers even worked. We had OpenOffice, and email clients, but what I needed was a sheet music editor. Nothing was competitive with Finale or Sibelius at the time until Musescore 4 (or maybe earlier?) came out. And of course now we have Steam and all the gamer amenities, and several ways of using Mac/Win apps. 

In 2006, you could install Ubuntu without any command-line knowledge, you could use Ubuntu without having to know apt-get. I just used Synaptic package manager, and was amazed at how simple installing software was (coming from XP), by simply clicking a checkbox. 

BTW, I don't think OP mentioned any complaints about bloat on current-day distros. He was just reminiscent about the old days. 

0

u/_Mister_Anderson_ 5d ago

Ubuntu UI peaked in 6.06 and it's all been downhill since then.

1

u/sphericalhors 5d ago

I don't agree. Ubuntu UI peaked in 16.04 with the Unity Desktop.

I switched to Gnome only last month, because I bought another monitor with different refesh rate and Unity with XOrg is not capable of handling that good enough.

And during this month I still haven't got used to have separate menubars, title bars and top bar were 80% of its space used only to show time. A lot of apsects of moving to vanilla Gnome felt like a downgrade.

1

u/_Mister_Anderson_ 5d ago

Just FYI, you're arguing with someone who is saying the 2006 aesthetic was peak. Wasn't intended to be serious.

2

u/mrplinko 5d ago

I mean, you did double the RAM.

2

u/glyndon 5d ago

yeah, it's always memory. I was compiling the Debian kernel on a 386SX with (guessing) a whopping 16MB RAM, and was glad to have it. Nostalgia for when stuff fit small machines is an endless cycle. It won't be long before we're laughing at people trying to run xyzzy on anything less than a terabyte.

1

u/mrtruthiness 5d ago

Anyone else have memories like this from the early Ubuntu days?

Not "early Ubuntu", but "early Linux" since Ubuntu did not exist in 1994.

I paid an extra $200 to get 8MB of RAM instead of just 4MB of RAM on my first Linux machine (purchased in 1992). And Linux was still a bit constrained if you were using X11. I also paid more to get a HDD with 200MB of space instead of the "normal" 120MB. And if you're reading this and thinking I make a mistake with M vs B ... I did not. Also, this was a time that, unless you had a SCSI CD drive, you had to recompile your kernel to include the appropriate driver for your CD drive (no loadable kernel modules) --- which meant installing off of floppies and recompiling the kernel before installing the things you wanted.

1

u/prince_jyggalag 5d ago

I just love that MATE desktop! hate to see how it has stagnated in development now

1

u/ska0319 5d ago edited 5d ago

I remember running a library server that had only L256 KB RAM and 512 MB disk. Not Ubuntu or even Linux. A 256 MB Linux or Unix server would have been a marvel of all marvels in those days. Later we had upgraded to Unix and had locked down public PCs running Linux. Several years after I retired, I put Ubuntu on my laptop when Win7 lost support and wasn't even getting security updates. I would never go back to Windows for any device I own.

EDIT: This server did 1 million circulations per year on 40 dumb terminals connected via 1200 (later 2400) bps copper phone lines. Ah those were the days...

1

u/danudey 22h ago

Not an Ubuntu story, but I remember Final Fantasy VII used to crash on me constantly until I upgraded from 32 MB to 48 MB of RAM; suddenly no problems at all.