Yeah I keep hearing this too, but it's not accurate now and probably hasn't for some time.
I run Gnome/Debian on a Toshiba Laptop Satellite 1600 with 384 Mb of SDRam with Gnome running and Chromium WebBrowser v10, HTop shows 267/384 Mb being used. This is with Gnome/Metacity. With Gnome/Openbox it's even less.
On my 256 MB notebook I wasn't able to install Ubuntu with Gnome. I could be that 384 MB is enough, as I had better luck with 512 MB computer. As far as I know Windows XP can install on 64 MB, that's six times less than 384 MB.
Yes, but practically how many of us use a computer with 64mb of ram (or even 256mb)?
Also, if you're ok with installing an older version of windows there is nothing stopping you from installing an older distribution of linux (I used linux on a 100Mhz Pentium with 16mb ram just fine back in the day).
> there is nothing stopping you from installing an older distribution of linux
We argument here if Gnome needs "too much" memory so that you need a relatively new computer to use it, and I gave the arguments for that, narrowing down the amount of memory needed and comparing it with still very useful and widely used XP.
> why is it legitimate in this argument to use an old version of windows but nut an old version of linux
Again, please don't change the topic, we are talking about Gnome, not about Linux in general. Linux kernel runs on my router with 16 MB RAM without any problems. Gnome is simply made without enough attention for configurations with limited resources, it's just so. There are other managers, of course. That's why huertanix mentioned XFCE.
