That’s kind of crazy. Firefox and libreoffice don’t do well in 1 Gig of ram but at least they’re doing something. You can run a decent DE and few decent apps in 1gig just fine with most Linux distros.
And Microsoft Word ran perfectly well on 16MB of RAM in Windows 95, back in the day; and even better on NT with 32 or 64MB, productive and more than comfy.
I guess my point is that running decent software on what today would be considered very little hardware is a solved problem, but it's not what the economy is optimized for.
The difference here is that LibreOffice is still maintained (in fact, the math typesetting in Microsoft office is practically unmaintained at this point and is just miserable to use.) Old windows (and old Linux) have serious problems that modern OSes don’t have. You can run moderngood and compatible software in very little ram and the only reason not to is because someone else is forcing you or you’re just not aware.
