I remember, in 2007, running FreeBSD on a desktop with 512MB RAM and only using 64MB of it running full GNOME 2 and a running instance of Firefox with a couple tabs. A totally standard desktop experience.

Even better, my laptop at the time had only 128MB of RAM and ran Windows XP - a supported, albeit minimal, configuration. XP was bloatier than FreeBSD of course, and ran correspondingly less well, but replacing explorer.exe with a shell called "blackbox" - an openbox-alike - and carefully curating applications (e.g. K-Meleon instead of Firefox) rendered it a perfectly viable multitasking desktop. I have a screenshot from that machine showing an AIM window, an mp3 player, an IDE for an embedded system, and a web browser with the documentation open for that IDE, all running comfortably (on one of its several desktops - yes you could have multiple desktops on XP with alternative shells such as blackbox).

Computers now require approximately 30x the RAM to achieve similar levels of "barely viable" performance - 4GB is considered the absolute minimum for general purpose desktop viability. And qualitatively speaking, what do they do now, that my 2007 fleet did not do? It is difficult to say. One is led to the conclusion that something has gone terribly awry with resource consumption.