The more jobs being done, the more ram being needed.

Although you also probably want a dual core ivybridge at minimum for that also.

Right now I am using less than 1500MB of ram and I am running dosbox-x with win95 in it. (games!)

Before that it was less than 900MB. I use jwm as many know here.

Anywho, my point I guess is, linux can be very minimal in ram usage if you try hard enough.

So yeah, you are correct.

@manessa Having 8GB means you could even have a vm of another linux distro on at the same time as well among quite a few other things. Provided your cpu could handle it, which it sounds like it could easily given it has 6 cores.

You will have very little trouble here even if you had a systemd distro.

But I doubt you plan to do that.

(I've also run it in just 1GB, but you need to give it some swap, about 2GB, if you intend going online.)

Most of my machines have 4GB.....

If you're careful 2GB is easily enough. I have one with 1GB most have 2GB one with 3GB one with 4GB and 1 (that's a shity MBP) with 8GB 

start with xfce if you want a DE and go from there.