I doubt a developer would buy such an underpowered machine in the first place. That said, I currently use a laptop that's seriously underpowered (by choice whe

I doubt a developer would buy such an underpowered machine in the first place. That said, I currently use a laptop that's seriously underpowered (by choice when I bought the thing ~7 years ago) with 4GB of RAM running Fedora and it does everything I need -- never once have I found I wasn't able to compile whatever random code I happen to be playing with at the moment. If ever I had to do serious dev work (like, it was my job) I'd need a better laptop but for the tinkering I do it works out just fine...though I did have to give up on Blender hacking a while back because of OpenGL versioning issues and I can't afford to buy a fancy new machine. That might not be an issue anymore, haven't checked on the OpenGL compatibility in quite a while TBH. I actually used to hack on Blender with a 2GB netbook (also running Fedora) before I got my current "beast" so those things aren't completely worthless as you would suggest.