I still have an XP laptop at work because it happens to have a serial port. Every time I use it I'm briefly shocked at how responsive everything is. That's on period hardware.
God the future sucks. IT has been destroyed by complexity fetishists and resume driven development.
Not entirely. There's still Alpine, Gentoo, Void, Debian/Devuan -- All of which still run on reasonably low specced hardware, and can be loaded with XFCE/Tiling WM's for a lightweight UX.
Outside of Linux and other FL/OSS OS's I have to agree though.
You say that as though everything above the Linux kernel isn't a nightmarish hodge-podge of software with interconnections ever increasing in complexity that creates conflicts so readily it needs third parties to carefully maintain specialized builds of each component to keep it all from blowing up.
I guess I've just given up on having a sole first party maintaining a sane system. It makes more sense to me to have something like Linux/BSD vs a first party system that falls apart worse while still being closed, despite being a consistent maintainer.
Which I guess brings me back around to where you started.
KDE runs in less than 400MB which would be fine on 2GB systems of the era. It's browsers and electron apps (browsers in disguise) that chew up all the memory, and once you start swapping it's over.
God the future sucks. IT has been destroyed by complexity fetishists and resume driven development.