I recently had to configure an older Thinkpad X1 Carbon G8 for my little brother. It's only got 8GB of RAM unfortunately and he needs Windows.

So I installed Windows 11 IoT LTSC like I usually do, installed all necessary drivers and manually deactivated services that don't need to run. It still uses 3GB of RAM while idling.

My 2-year-old daily driver Manjaro install uses half of that, and that's on a system with 32GB RAM where Windows would almost certainly use more just because there's more