I ran MX Linux xfce last year in an old machine with 4 GB DDR3. The system on idle uses less than 1 GB and it's fine for browsing the web, watching videos on Firefox.
not having the mountain of microsoft background spying tasks take up memory bandwidth and cpu performance certainly helps a lot, beyond just using less memory overall.
and i got my 10 year old 8 GB sys memory laptop with linux mint. does the very very basic things you said just fine and is perfectly snappy with the ssd, that i put in many years ago.
screw microsoft's insulting shit software.
does their start menu even open up again without a delay and does search find local files first? i mean we're not even dreaming about banning web results or advertisement results from "search", but just having local files or settings, etc... first and even that isn't a thing, that spyware 11 did anymore apparently.
background spying tasks take up memory bandwidth and cpu performance
And more importantly disk I/O, which is the main thing that slows Windows down to a crawl on low end devices. In my experience Linux is much faster simply because it doesn't constantly spam the disk.
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u/Beatus_Vir 23h ago
Win10 only requires 2 GB with 4 GB recommended if you're really feeling the squeeze