Why? Why should someone upgrade their ram just so the UI works smoothly? We've had smooth UI's for twenty years, even back when 32 MB of ram was the norm - so why should someone upgrade to 8 GB just for the UI? Hell, if I upgrade my ram (I have 8 already, but anway) I'll want it to be to benefit all the applications I like to run and I expect the UI and OS to use as little as possible and still perform smoothly.
My old eee pc was able to run windows xp just fine before I installed Arch with a tiling window manager on it and everything ran well, everything was fast, everything was smooth - for about three years - and then I installed Ubuntu and Unity brought it to a standstill despite not using any different applications than I always used. Even switching workspaces sometimes took 15 seconds or so. Yes, it only has 1 GB of ram, but like I said, I used the same applications that I always did without problems. I struggled with it for a few months and switched back to Arch and haven't had any problems since (though I now use a laptop which does have 8 gigs of ram and rather than using that ram to make unity run smoothly, I'm using it so I can run windows 7 and linux at the same time with VirtualBox).
Why? Why should someone upgrade their ram just so the UI works smoothly? We've had smooth UI's for twenty years, even back when 32 MB of ram was the norm - so why should someone upgrade to 8 GB just for the UI? Hell, if I upgrade my ram (I have 8 already, but anway) I'll want it to be to benefit all the applications I like to run and I expect the UI and OS to use as little as possible and still perform smoothly.
My old eee pc was able to run windows xp just fine before I installed Arch with a tiling window manager on it and everything ran well, everything was fast, everything was smooth - for about three years - and then I installed Ubuntu and Unity brought it to a standstill despite not using any different applications than I always used. Even switching workspaces sometimes took 15 seconds or so. Yes, it only has 1 GB of ram, but like I said, I used the same applications that I always did without problems. I struggled with it for a few months and switched back to Arch and haven't had any problems since (though I now use a laptop which does have 8 gigs of ram and rather than using that ram to make unity run smoothly, I'm using it so I can run windows 7 and linux at the same time with VirtualBox).