I have an older device with 256M installed that runs 2.2 and while it can slow down at times it does pretty well running opera, a mailer, navigation and google

I have an older device with 256M installed that runs 2.2 and while it can slow down at times it does pretty well running opera, a mailer, navigation and google music streaming all in ram all on top of a bytecode vm. Lets not forget no swap space. As a lark I just booted ubuntu 12.04 with mem=256M. It got to the greeter reasonably quickly, but it's been 10 minutes since i hit enter and I still haven't seen the desktop. I planned to launch chromium and thunderbird and report the swap used, but you get the idea. Its true that a lighter DE would be more usable, but I think you're looking at desktop RAM usage with rose colored memories.