Linux and OS/2 ran on similar specs. Used both of them (triple booting with DOS etc) with 10 MB of ram happily and without too much of swap trashing with XFree8

Linux and OS/2 ran on similar specs. Used both of them (triple booting with DOS etc) with 10 MB of ram happily and without too much of swap trashing with XFree86 and even with the early KDE.