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 You can comment or edit if you feel that the information is obsolete or incomplete.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
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.
Recommended
For latest recommended requirements, visit download page of Ubuntu Desktop.
Xubuntu
Recommended for Xubuntu 20.04 or later:
Kubuntu
The official flavour of Ubuntu using KDE. The default desktop environment is KDE Plasma Desktop.
Minimum
Xenial Xerus (16.04)
Bionic Beaver (18.04)
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.
Recommended
The recommended requirement is based on this poorly cited source on Wikipedia and this partially compatible requirements for Ubuntu 16.04. The amount of system memory and free disk space are similar to the requirements for KDE neon.
Kubuntu has no official system requirements to this revised date.
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.
Hardware Requirements:
Minimum:
Recommended:
Reference:
Ubuntu Kylin
Ubuntu variant for Chinese users.
Minimum
Trusty Tahr (14.04)
Zesty Zapus (17.04)
Ubuntu Kylin daily build has 64-bit PC desktop image only and has noted that user will need at least 1024 MiB of RAM to install from the image.
Recommended
No official information found yet
Ubuntu Budgie (formerly Budgie-Remix)
The official flavour of Ubuntu using Budgie desktop environment, since 9 November 2016. 17.04 is the first official release under the new name, Ubuntu Budgie.
Minimum
The minimum specified hardware for flawless experience.
In 90% of cases you are good to go with those and specs above. However, some machines have specific hardware that requires you to check the driver before installation which is usually related to Broadcom Network cards found in laptops.
Recommended
The recommended download details for 18.04 and newer:
See "Installation Guide" in download page of Ubuntu Budgie.
Modern Lubuntu (using LXQt)
The Lubuntu team published Taking a New Direction
which states
with the following goals
meaning
Devices with as little as 1GB of RAM were used in QA-testing Lubuntu up to and into the disco cycle (or Lubuntu 19.04), however devices used for QA-testing later releases contained 2GB or more of RAM.
Your requirements will vary on how you use your machine, especially application choice (ie. selecting software that uses the same libraries already used by your desktop means less RAM is required).
Lubuntu up to 18.04 used the LXDE desktop which used the GTK2 toolkit. The LXDE developers however felt GTK3 was too heavy, so had joined forces with the Razor-Qt developers creating a new LXQt desktop that would remain light and fully utilize Qt5.
Lubuntu doesn't use KF5 (KDE Frameworks 5) so whilst KDE apps will efficiently use Qt5 libs already used by the desktop, the hit to many KDE apps is the need to load KF5, which is still likely less than using an GTK3 app.
The right choice for you, will depend very much on what applications you use.
A recent Front Page Linux article wrote
however as already indicated, if you need specific GTK3 apps, Lubuntu may not be best for your use-case; only you can decide what's best for you; based on what you'll use your machine for.
Regarding 32-bit x86 CPUs
As of October 2019 (Ubuntu version 19.10 and 20.04 LTS), the 32-bit x86 architecture is no longer officially supported in Ubuntu.
This means that if you still have a 32-bit CPU, the best option is to look for another Linux distribution that officially supports 32-bit x86 architecture.
To find out details about your CPU, visit the following links and search for your CPU model: