What are the system requirements for each flavour of Ubuntu Desktop?

system-requirements

I'm thinking about installing Ubuntu Desktop, but I don't know what flavor is the best for my system. What are the minimum and recommended hardware requirements? What kind of CPU? How much memory? Should I have Hardware Acceleration? What flavor should I use?

This is an attempt of a canonical answer. My answers have the "official requirements", the recommended are a mix of official sources and opinion based (along with the answer it's told the source). You can comment or edit if you feel that the information is obsolete or incomplete.

It is a good rule of thumb that any system capable of running Windows Vista, 7, 8, x86 (Intel) OS X will almost always be a lot faster with any Ubuntu flavor even if they are lower-spec than described below.

Ubuntu Desktop

Ubuntu returned to using the GNOME Shell with Ubuntu 17.10, so it's the only non-ESM desktop supported.

Recommended Minimums

Bionic Beaver (18.04) and later
- at least 2 GHz 64-bit processor
- at least 4 GB of system memory
- at least 25 GB of free disk space Minimum 8.6 GB
- other requirements may follow the "Recommended" section
- VGA capable of 1024 x 768 screen resolution
- 3D Acceleration capable GPU with at least 256 MB

Ubuntu has varying requirements on VM.

Bionic Beaver (18.04) on VM: Requires VT-x/AMD-V hardware acceleration. Requires at least 1156 MB RAM and 128 MB video memory, but disable 3D acceleration for at least usable desktop to open menu and change settings. This is the practical minimum for a test drive, but not for daily use.

Xubuntu

enter image description here

Recommended for Xubuntu 20.04 or later:

2+ GiB of system memory (RAM) Minimum 512MB
20+ GB of disk space Minimum 8GB
Graphics card and monitor capable of 1024x768 resolution
1.5 Ghz dual Core processor

Kubuntu

The official flavour of Ubuntu using KDE. The default desktop environment is KDE Plasma Desktop.

Minimum

Xenial Xerus (16.04)
- 5 GB of free disk space
- other requirements are similar to the following
Bionic Beaver (18.04)
- 1 GHz processor
- 512 MB of system memory (RAM)
- 8 GB of free disk space
- VGA capable of 1024x768 screen resolution

The minimum requirements were last mentioned in Kubuntu 8.04 news announcement, then merely copied from Ubuntu 12.04 release note and has since deprecated, and not found at elsewhere. The minimum requirements for newer release is unofficial and subject to testing on real hardware or in a virtual machine (VM). Kubuntu has varying requirements on VM.

Xenial Xerus (16.04) on VM: Requires at least 1 GB RAM, 10 GB fixed-size Virtual Disk Image, 128 MB video memory. Selecting "Try Kubuntu" or "Install Kubuntu" does not matter. Live session will takes time to load; If virtual machine has stopped responding, do reset and start again. Installation may take longer time. User will see "low disk space warning" during installation but will succeed.

Bionic Beaver (18.04) on VM: Requires VT-x/AMD-V hardware acceleration, regardless of 32-bit or 64-bit ISO image. Requires at least 9 GB fixed-size Virtual Disk Image. With 512 MB RAM, choose either "Try Kubuntu" or "Install Kubuntu"; otherwise, running the installer from desktop will not work as expected. With 768 MB RAM, user can first choose "Try Kubuntu" and later can also run the installer from the live desktop.

Ubuntu Mate

Ubuntu Mate is a official flavour of Ubuntu, based on Mate DE. Designed to run on modern desktops and laptops, micro computers and older hardware alike.

Ubuntu Mate ^{Image from Wikipedia}

Hardware Requirements:

Minimum:

Pentium M 1.0 gigahertz
1 gigabyte (GB) of RAM
9 gigabytes (GB) of available space on the hard disk
Bootable DVD-ROM drive/USB flash drive
Keyboard and Mouse (or other pointing device)
Video adapter and monitor with 1024 x 768 or higher resolution
Sound card
Speakers or headphones