How slow can Linux go?

[ Thanks to Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols for this link. ]

"The short answer to this question is "not much at all." In fact, I don't think you could buy a computer at your local Best Buy or online that can't run Linux.

"Let's take Ubuntu 9.04, which is due to arrive this week. The official minimum requirements for this popular Linux distribution are a 700MHz processor and 256MBs of RAM. I think that's too low. In my experience, you could run GNOME 2.26 on that slow a processor, but the RAM's way too low. You could pull it off with 512MBs, but you'd be happier with a Gigabyte.

"A reader recently claimed to me that he had an older PC that can run Windows 7, but wasn't powerful enough to run any modern desktop Linux. Yeah. Right. Windows 7 'officially' requires, a 1GHz processor, 1GB of memory, 16GBs of free hard drive space and 128MB of graphics memory on a chip set or card able to support DirectX 9. As with every version of Windows going back to 1.02, Microsoft is lying about the minimum requirements."

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