[SwellJoe]

I have also found that desktop Linux has stopped being a reasonable solution to "bloat". I don't concern myself too much with bloat, as my machines are all pretty big (8GB laptop, 16GB desktop), but even with 8GB I can occasional get myself into a swapping situation. Firefox (I use the multiprocess developer version) and Thunderbird are memory hogs with an impressive appetite, so if I also start up a large-ish editor (like Atom or VSCode) and Inkscape or a video editor, I can end up with real memory problems.

I haven't actually dug in to see where all the memory is going precisely, but my email/web workflow (Firefox+Thunderbird) has been the same for about ten years now, so it's interesting that it continues to bump up against memory limits no matter how much memory I have. But, Windows on the same system has similar memory issues when working on the same tasks; so it is not immune, but I don't think it is notably worse than Linux.