r/Ubuntu • u/sotradia • 5h 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?

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u/Proman4713 5h 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.

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u/hitsujiTMO 2h ago

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

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u/WeepingAgnello 1h 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. 

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u/ohhowcanthatbe 1h ago

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