My dev machine is an off the shelf Acer aspire laptop that I bought used, it comes with a 4GB RAM, I also added 4GB of swap memory. I use it to develop fullstack applications for servers, browsers and android. My stack is Rust, Javascript, Dart/Flutter, Postgresql and running Debian 13.

It works great, I mainly use 2 applications , Firefox and urxvt, using emacs -nw to write code, no LSP or code completion because they use too much RAM. I also use i3wm which very lightweight.

The only issue with it is that some keys on the keyboard don't work, so I mapped them to different keys, for example ctrl is mapped to caps lock, 0 is mapped to 3 on the numpad, enter is mapped to right shift etc. Because of this I can't type on other peoples computers, I would need to run my xmodmap script before I do that.