1 Go RAM is not enough today, 2 Go is recommended.
Linux has zram (real-time RAM compression/decompression). It can help in scenarios with ram constraints. Essentially you are trading processing power (that you may have in excess), with RAM (that you lack).
There is also zswap where you trade processing power for reduced I/O operations while swapping to a medium, by compressing the swap data.
If one has something like raspberry, and its cpu is good (I have no idea whether it is or not), but lacks RAM, then they can trade the cpu power with compressed ram + compressed swap, and make the impossible => possible.
Another tradeoff that you may face, is in the selection of medium space. A minimum of 256gb (blockchain currently at >110gb which means the 128gb will be full very soon) seems inevitable, but even that can drop if you compress the partition and trade CPU time in realtime compression/decompression with storage space. A compressed partition might reduce space requirements for the blockchain by 20-30%, postponing a 256gb medium purchase - for when their prices drop. If you use a HDD, space is not such a problem but for cards, flash storage etc, it is.