I have a still barely usable HP MS200 all-in-one machine. I got it cheap at a garage sale in 2017. It wasn't fast, but with Linux on it, once Google Chrome was finally loaded, it was OK, even to the point of running the web version of Skype for fullscreen video chats, certainly for watching fullscreen Youtube. It went off to the in-laws as a Youtube watching and Gmail station.

Recently it came back to me. And with the old, 2017 vintage software on it, still worked as it did then. But before making it a kiddie computer, I installed FC38 and the current version of Chrome.

But Youtube videos were now "slide shows". No amount of fiddling with the settings made them play right. Finally gave up and changed the RAM from 2GB to 3GB - I just happened to have the right (laptop) memory card to do that.

And that brought it back to the old, barely adequate (720p fullscreen without noticeable skips) performance. 1.5x as much memory, an extra gigabyte, to do the same thing as six years ago.

"So get with the program and buy an adequate machine! Don't you know that 16GB is the absolute minimum to get anything done these days?" Sure - I have machines with 16GB+ in them. Even on the crappy machine though, Google Chrome is showing a memory footprint on the order of 30GB. I'm sure most of that is mmap'ed files; it sure isn't RAM. But 30GB. For a mostly idle web browser.