It's terrible that 2-8GB RAM is not enough for a full on desktop replacement. You could run Windows 95 in 4 MB. Was that not a desktop? The original Mac was just 128 KB.
Suppose it was all for graphics. Scaling up for modern color depth and screen size, we should need about 400 MB for the Windows 95 level of efficiency, or about 64 MB for Mac level of efficiency. That's a huge overestimate because RAM is not all consumed by graphics.
In other words, modern software can't run a desktop properly without even 10 to 100 times as much RAM as it ought to need.
My desktop with KDE Plasma 5 consumes somewhere in the ballpark of 500 MB RAM initially on startup.
RAM consumption by Konsole, tmux, and Neovim (30+ loaded buffers) combined is negligible to say the least.
RAM consumption by my browser with 10+ windows and 100+ tabs loaded easily exceeds 4+ GB even when exclusively visiting supposedly "lightweight" text based sites (ie documentation).
Going beyond RAM, playing a video on YouTube occupies a small but noticeable fraction of total CPU time. A single script heavy ad laden site sometimes manages to occupy a problematically large fraction of all available cores. Depending on the site, Dark Reader might slow this all to a crawl for 10+ seconds as the bloated page gradually loads (I'm looking at you, Amazon).
Suppose it was all for graphics. Scaling up for modern color depth and screen size, we should need about 400 MB for the Windows 95 level of efficiency, or about 64 MB for Mac level of efficiency. That's a huge overestimate because RAM is not all consumed by graphics.
In other words, modern software can't run a desktop properly without even 10 to 100 times as much RAM as it ought to need.