The first RAM read is with just Terminal open - 416M. The second one is with Firefox playing a 1080p YouTube video – 955M.
You use the
free -h command. What I'm trying to convey to you is that different commands to measure the RAM lead to different results. So there is no consensus on what is the correct methodology to measure RAM usage. You can try the three methods below.
www.rkeene.org
Light-weight system monitor for X, Wayland (sort of), and other things, too - brndnmtthws/conky
github.com
htop - an interactive process viewer. Contribute to htop-dev/htop development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
What you're going to see is that these three will give
significantly different results at any given time. If you want to compare your RAM usage with my result you should use neofetch instead of free -h.
Of course you can use whatever you want, but I'm just saying that Ubuntu is objectively one of the worst Linux systems for older (weak) hardware. I have also given three different reasons:
1. Ubuntu's package manager is one of the slowest around, much slower than XBPS and pacman.
2. Ubuntu's systemd boot init is much slower than what you'll see in systems that don't use systemd like eg Devuan, Artix Linux, Void Linux, MX Linux.
3. Ubuntu has the vision that Snaps should become the standard for their system. Snaps the slowest solution currently in existence when compared to alternatives such as AppImage, Flatpak and Nix. The installation of snaps is very slow and opening the apps is also very slow every time with the heavier apps.
If you're going to use old hardware it's still going to be a bit slower, even if you're using the fastest Linux distros. So if you use Ubuntu on old hardware you will find yourself losing time all the time, the more you use Ubuntu on old hardware the more time you lose. Maybe you hardly ever use it and then it doesn't really matter. But if you use it frequently, you simply lose a lot of time.