I know RAM prices aren't under control of the raspberry pi project, but something has gone dreadfully wrong in the economy when individual 8GB+ raspberry pi are now costing $200 to $300 for just the board before you add USB-C power supply, heatsinks, case, etc.

If a person doesn't need GPIO pins or other direct access to hardware [1], I don't understand why people are trying to use them with 1080p and 4K displays, keyboards and mice as general desktop linux computers. You can get a far more capable small form factor or ultra small form factor used Intel Core i5/i7 something corporate desktop with 16GB of RAM and a real SSD for like 150 bucks on eBay (USD). It'll be significantly faster.

Install barebones debian amd64, 'sudo apt install xfce4-desktop', it'll pull in all the xorg and other dependencies and also install a GUI login screen.

20 seconds of searching turned up something that doesn't suck: https://www.ebay.com/itm/820084016851?_skw=dell+optiplex+16G...

The one raspberry pi model which is still close to the original's $35 price is the raspberry pi model 4 1GB which is $49 in Canada. Accounting for inflation and difference between USD:CAD, that's about the same as 35 bucks.

[1]: https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/rpi-gpio-pins