Im still daily driving my 2013 macbook air with 128gb ssd and well 8gb ram. 100’s of browser tabs, photoshop, kicad and illustrator often at the same time. Never reboot, always sleep. Runs Catalina. Best machine ever. [edit] while going through many eeepcs, several thinkpads and two desktop pcs in that period [edit2: these were prolly older than 10 years tho ;)]
I don't really understand how you do this.
Even running archlinux with clamd and a tiny windows manager takes ~2-4 GB of RAM to do effectively "nothing".
So, of course, MacOS takes ~8GB of RAM to do effectively nothing, such is about the same for windows.
Unless you're running something like alpine Linux these days, you're going to be eating a ton of RAM and cycles for surveillance, telemetry, and other silly 'features' for these companies.
