For comparison, here are the official hardware recommendations for Debian: https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/ch03s04.en.html
"With Desktop" has 1GB minimum and 2GB recommended - along with Pentium 4, 1GHz cpu.
"With Desktop" has 1GB minimum and 2GB recommended - along with Pentium 4, 1GHz cpu.
This seems like a recommendation to just really get to the desktop itself + maybe some light usage. Anything more than that and the "recommendation" is fairly useless with the memory hog of apps that are commonly used.