I think this depends most on your personal dev workflow and where heavier tasks are happening. At one then of the spectrum you can just be browsing for info, t

I think this depends most on your personal dev workflow and where heavier tasks are happening. At one then of the spectrum you can just be browsing for info, then writing code in vim, and that's it locally, if you push code up to a remote git server and that triggers remote build, test and deploy. Or even just remotely connecting into a heavier linux dev box (eg. in a cloud). On the other end you're using a heavier IDE which triggers local recompiles on every save, heavy code indexing locally for a big project, builds are then spun locally into VMs or containers running on your local machine, etc. 8Gb is going to be fine for the first example. It will not be nearly sufficient for the second. Browsers on linux tend to get pretty heavy, as that's often where you'll be running a mail client, video calling, Slack, etc, and they aren't exactly lightweight these days to start with.