Certainly a lot depends on the kind of development you're doing. Us greybeards programmed on systems with kilobytes of RAM. Of course we didn't have the benef

Certainly a lot depends on the kind of development you're doing. Us greybeards programmed on systems with kilobytes of RAM. Of course we didn't have the benefits of a modern IDE, but the point is that programming on a limited system is absolutely possible, if not ideal. You'll get a better experience by cutting out overhead you don't need so your RAM and CPU are dedicated to the tasks that really help your productivity. As others have suggested, consider using a lightweight window manager. XFCE is reliable and familiar, but if you're up for the learning curve, then tiling window managers like i3 or sway are very snappy. If you're doing web development, I kind of wish more developers would test their apps in a constrained environment. Plenty of users out there will be pulling up web pages on laptops with 2 gigs of RAM or less. If you're programming a compiled language, see if you can run the compiler on some other host. A nearby desktop or server, or in the cloud. You can easily mount a remote filesystem using sshfs, and there are plenty of other options for making this more or less seamless. If memory is a constraint, then be sure to have enough swap space. Reading from the drive will be slower than reading from RAM, but you can mitigate this by getting a faster SSD. If you can get more than one SSD and you put swap partitions on both of them, then Linux will read/write from both for better performance, analogous to RAID 0.