Given that efficiency one of Linux's most touted advantages, what in the world is Ubuntu's PR department thinking? Ubuntu isn't providing any more functionality than when its memory requirement was 4GB. What is hogging all that extra ram?

> what in the world is Ubuntu's PR department thinking?

The same as any other corporate PR department: "At least now when people run it with N GB of RAM, we can just point to the system requirements and say 'This is what we support' rather than end up in a back-and-forth"

If you expect them to have any sort of long-term outlook on "Lets be careful with how developers view our organization", I think you're about a decade too late for Canonical.

No official reason given, so all the tech press is basically speculating (if someone finds a source that does a teardown, please share; I can't seem to locate one). I think my favorite piece of speculation is that it reflects an anticipated modern workload of using the OS as a vector to launch a web browser and open multiple tabs in it, which is just going to be a memory hog as experienced by most Ubuntu users.

I don't know what Ubuntu is doing with the RAM but I'm constantly swapping with all of the 16GB RAM filled on my work laptop with Ubuntu.

At home I have a desktop running Arch plus Gnome with 32GB RAM and I am at 7GB on a normal day and below 16GB at all times unless I run an LLM.

The sad answer is: nobody cares.

Besides the correct answer that Canonical sucks, I would argue that “efficiency” is not a selling point to get someone to use a desktop operating system.

Mainstream users and business organizations don’t really understand that concept and would prefer to see how the operating system enables their use cases and workflows.