Today, we’re happy to announce the launch of the 2GB Raspberry Pi 5, built on a cost-optimised D0 stepping of the BCM2712 application processor, and priced at just $50.
The new D0 stepping strips away all that unneeded functionality, leaving only the bits we need. From the perspective of a Raspberry Pi user, it is functionally identical to its predecessor: the same fast quad-core processor; the same multimedia capabilities; and the same PCI Express bus that has proven to be one of the most exciting features of the Raspberry Pi 5 platform. However, it is cheaper to make, and so is available to us at somewhat lower cost. And this, combined with the savings from halving the memory capacity, has allowed us to take $10 out of the cost of the finished product.
So, while our most demanding users — who want to drive dual 4Kp60 displays, or open a hundred browser tabs, or compile complex software from source — will probably stick with the existing higher memory-capacity variants of Raspberry Pi 5, many of you will find that this new, lower-cost variant works perfectly well for your use cases.
Not enough RAM to be honest (at least not to be useful in the near future). I ran an Emby/Jellyfin server with 180 GB of music (nothing else was running, not even the UI), and it ran out of RAM, and was swapping like crazy at 1 GB of RAM on my Rpi3. In this day and age, you need 2 GB of RAM for servers, but that won't be enough within a couple of years (and that's why I don't suggest this new model with 2 GB of RAM). I personally would only get a new Raspberry Pi if it comes with 16 GB of RAM, so I can run a UI properly. You just can't ever have enough RAM these days. Linux is using less RAM than Win11, but not by much these days. It's growing too fast in requirements in the last 3-4 years.
3 years ago XFCe needed on Debian about 450 MB of RAM (on a clean boot). It now needs 850. And that's not so much XFce's fault, it's all the other stuff underneath that have been growing too much too.
I mean, heck, Cosmic should not need more than 500 MB of RAM overall, having such a clean codebase. And yet it's the heaviest of them all, at 2.5 GB (even Gnome/KDE boots at 1.3 GB on Debian). And it's not a matter of optimization because it's an alpha. That's a cheap explanation. It's just heavy. Just as much as Windows in terms of ram usage.