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Ive tried 20.04 on a phenom x4 905e with 3gb pf ram. It passes all hardware tests. Tried dvd and thumbdrive installs. It goes to a black screen with white ubuntu at the bottom and a mouse pointer that moves but nothing else. Getting really frustrated as ubuntu 8,9, 10, 16 run fine on this machine.

david
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  • Did you look at the requirements - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequirements (please also note that whilst you didn't say if you're asking about desktop, server etc. they have very different requirements, video ram, 3D capacity is required of the GPU, resolution requirements etc must also be met for Ubuntu 17.10 & later (ie. GNOME releases) for desktop; flavors need less, server even less) – guiverc Sep 13 '21 at 06:40
  • Also note Ubuntu products using the year format (eg. Ubuntu Core 16) are smaller products that have very different requirements; they are designed for limited devices, appliances or used in the cloud where being small is both a requirement and benefit. You cannot compare the full year.month products with the year products. – guiverc Sep 13 '21 at 06:41

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The 3GB of memory will certainly be an issue for Gnome-based desktops since 2018. Let's look at the hardware requirements over the years:

Release Minimum Recommended
8.04 (Hardy) 32 or 64-bit CPU / 384 MB RAM for the Desktop
9.04 (Jaunty) 32 or 64-bit CPU / 256 MB RAM for the Desktop
10.04 (Lucid) 32 or 64-bit CPU / 256 MB RAM for the Desktop
16.04 (Xenial) 1GHz 32 or 64-bit CPU / 1.5 GB RAM / 10 GB Storage
20.04 (Focal) 2 GHz 64-bit CPU / 4 GB RAM / 25 GB Storage

As you can see, the system requirements have evolved quite a bit along with the operating system itself. The AMD Phenom x4 905e does meet the requirements with its 2.5 GHz clock and 64-bit instruction set, but Gnome may be a bit too heavy for the system. As a result, you may want to try a lighter distribution such as Ubuntu MATE or Bodhi Linux. Both of these are pretty darn good alternatives.

matigo
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    evolved is close to devolved. The op systems may be prettier to some eyes but i find it a pain when the cute gui cant tell you where your files really are. the programmers use the newer higher languages with tons of overhead and a larger number of instructions to do the same thing. So on the same cpu the typical program takes 4 to 10 times longer to do something at 5 times the size of code PLUS all the dlls and dependencies it loads alongside it. – david Sep 14 '21 at 20:23