I am using Asus netbook with 1GB RAM, 32GB SSD (and vanilla Ubuntu) quite regularly, and use it to write Haskell programs. Frankly the small disk is more of a c

I am using Asus netbook with 1GB RAM, 32GB SSD (and vanilla Ubuntu) quite regularly, and use it to write Haskell programs. Frankly the small disk is more of a concern, but I have to be mindful of memory also. If I run Firefox, Emacs and GHC together, there is a high chance that I run out of memory (and more likely than not, Linux OOM will kill a wrong process after a 20-minute system freeze). (I wish I could get rid of Firefox from the three, but I need to look up documentation for whatever language I use, usually Haskell, and eww is not a replacement, because it's not multithreaded, Emacs freezes when it needs to format a web page.) In any case, in early 00s, I was using a 486 machine with 12 MB of RAM with Linux. It was spartan but writing Latex (I think I was using Jed and twm at the time) was possible on it.