Comment 8 for bug 745148

Well, even this soon following my last iso-testing install (same iso/md5sum as the official Beta1) my / partition is 3.10GiB. And I've so far only installed updates and tweaked my resolution using Xrandr via /etc/gdm/PreSession/Default.

So 2.6GB is simply incorrect just based on root partition size alone. No doubt everyone will want to install some additional packages, save at least a bit of data, not have their web browser crash because it can't store history, etc.

I personally think anything less than 6GB for / is a disaster looking for a place to happen. Then we should take into consideration swap.

While most newer machines will seldom use swap, we need to take into consideration the ability of laptops and netbooks to suspend and/or hibernate. My swap formula amounts to:

up to 1GB RAM > double that for SWAP
1GB to 2GB of RAM > 2GB + SWAP
over 2GB RAM > SWAP must be at least the same size as RAM to allow for suspend/hibernate

So what is realistic? Here's what the community documentation says:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequirements