I've been enjoying running Mint on my terrible spec chromebook - it only has 3GB of RAM, but it rarely exceeds 2GB used with random additions and heavy firefox use. The battery life is obscenely good too, I easily break 20 hours on it as long as I'm not doing something obviously taxing.

Modern software is fine for the most part. People look at browsers using tens of gigabytes on systems with 32GB+ and complain about waste rather than being thrilled that it's doing a fantastic job caching stuff to run quickly.