Most of those came with only 4gb ram' and Lion takes ~500mb ram or do a rest. Certain old versions of ProTools also perform well in it.Firefox Dynasty
Any reason you are using Lion on a 2012 air?
If you have a 2012 with 8GB's and are going to Mavericks, you might as well go all the way to Mojave. Disable MRT, MDS_stores, Report-crash, Spotlight indexing, software update (to prevent Catalina), and and carbon copy clone the installation (after it's fully updated) to an HFS+ (aka MacOS Extended-journaled ) partition with hdd and Fusion drives. (APFS should only ever be used with SSDs. )Mountain Lion is a huge improveAment over lion imo.