I dont know about Gnome, but kde plasma “should” run and be usable with 1GB ram. At least ive seen some posts about people doing it. I think at minimum you would need to customize your ram related kernel parameters like swappiness, the watermark scale factor (kernel memory threshold for caching) and stuff like that. But i cant say ive ever run such a small system with a DE.
I dont know about Gnome, but kde plasma “should” run and be usable with 1GB ram. At least ive seen some posts about people doing it. I think at minimum you would need to customize your ram related kernel parameters like swappiness, the watermark scale factor (kernel memory threshold for caching) and stuff like that. But i cant say ive ever run such a small system with a DE.