This is a funny statement, because Qubes seems bloated as crap to me. I've been playing around with it lately. The netvm and firewallvm take up 500 MB of RAM each! For what? These VMs shouldn't be using 50 MB of RAM. The dom0 control stack takes a full 2 GB. So just to boot into the default desktop you need 3 GB, and each AppVM starts out using 500 MB and grows as you run more apps. You really need 6-8 GB to run Qubes, with 4 GB as the bare minimum. You can probably reconfigure these VMs to use less RAM, but that is the default setup.