I don't think esoteric linuxes are really necessary--I'm running vanilla Ubuntu 16.04 with 16GB RAM and top three processes are only Crashplan (~800MB), Dropbox (~460) and Chrome (327 resident, 1380 shared, per htop, with 6 tabs running). My total usage at the moment is 4.04GB out of 15.4 available, again per htop. Some of the other numbers in this thread are baffling to me.

But I don't run any Electron apps, so there's that.

But, yeah, I guess I wouldn't be able to run this same workload with 4GB RAM. That's what lubuntu is for.