We’re not focusing on performance on low-end machines in this Roundup, but all of these distributions should be way ahead of Microsoft Windows on such hardware. We’ve reached a point where even a comprehensive Linux desktop doesn’t require a huge chunk of the memory in a computer with only 8GB or even 4GB of RAM at a push.
If you were working with an extremely resourceconstrained machine, Lubuntu would be our first choice of distro from this selection. On a fresh boot, only 560MB of RAM is in use. Lubuntu was also the least disk-space-hungry of the flavours on test, only requiring 7.3GB of space on an updated fresh installation.
Kubuntu offers a state-of-the art Linux desktop that looks great, and it proves our point as it only uses 833MB of RAM and takes up 16GB of disk space. We were slightly surprised that Ubuntu MATE also used 16GB of disk space because it’s not particularly packed with applications, but it’s not that important in most situations. It also used 886MB of RAM, which is perfectly fine for computers with 4GB of memory or more – modern browsers are the real hogs.
Edubuntu is also far from being a resource hog as it only used 962MB of RAM. It used the most disk space of any of the flavours at 19GB, but that’s hardly surprising, given how many applications it packs in. Much the same can be said of Ubuntu Studio. This uses 1GB of RAM on fresh boot and 14GB of disk space, neither requirement a big deal on the sort of computer you’d probably use for media creation work.