Linux

Biggest thing that I think is pretty badly phrased... is linux "system requirements". considering in the windows world if you try and install with less than the required ram... the installer will usually stop you.

While in ubuntu they may say "requirement" but it's a recomendation. You can install 26 into a VM with 1 GB of ram... and it will run. Really nothing in this version of ubuntu is more resource hungry than the previous version. So in short them boosting the number is just saying "if you use a typical amount of tabs open in your browser, 6gb ram is kind of needed".

So yeah I'd say most likely the fair way to put it is, windows 11 will let you install on 4gb of ram... but most would say it's very unusable even at a basic level with that, you can run ubuntu with that... it will probably not be a great experience, but not as bad as windows until you start running into large web apps or tons of tabs.

Heck OS's really could just have an "overhead" kind of number or something. Because that's the real thing, what you need is system specs that can handle your

system kernel + system services > Interface (be it terminal or gui) > application (and if that application is loading external sources like web pages, add that in too).

Point is your "minimum" line, should stop at what you consider the default parts of your distribution. IE interface and below.

Obviously no one is using it without applciations, but we don't know what applications people are using. It's not like we do this for storage. IE we aren't saying "ok yeah everything we included is within 5 GB, so we're setting the requirement at 200 TB because you can't be a video editor without that much space.