Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will run on a Raspberry Pi 4 with just 2GB of RAM
The Raspberry Pi line of computers are small, inexpensive single-board PCs that are most commonly used to run GNU/Linux distributions. But while Raspberry Pi devices have been shipping since 2012, it took more than eight years for one of the most popular Linux distributions to add support – and even then, the developers of Ubuntu only officially supported Raspberry Pi 4 computers with at least 4GB of RAM.
Now the developers of Ubuntu say the next release of their desktop operating system should be able to run on Raspberry Pi hardware with as little as 2GB of RAM.
In a blog post, developers say that one of the goals for the upcoming Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release, due out in April, is “targeting a viable Desktop experience on Raspberry Pi 4 2GB models,” which typically sell for $45, which makes them about $10 cheaper than models with 4GB of RAM.
They’ll do that by using a Linux kernel feature called zswap, which compresses data stored in RAM before moving it to an SD card or other storage space designated for use as swap memory… and which can quickly check to see if you still actually need to actually move those files to swap memory after they’ve been compressed or if they’ll take up less space and run more quickly if they remain in RAM.
