In my last job we had some memory issues with the build, many times I ended up running out of memory, trying to build the huge Java monolith that was the stupid

In my last job we had some memory issues with the build, many times I ended up running out of memory, trying to build the huge Java monolith that was the stupid "product" we made. Automagically, the issues were resolved to a decent extent when switching from GNOME to XFCE, in Ubuntu 24.04. There is still some use for lightweight even in today. You make better use of your memory/resources in some application, than in something so fundamental.