[Cartwright2]

How are people able to develop on chromebook-like devices with 2GB RAM? I'm seeing a lot of such devices in this thread and don't understand it. Once I spin up a couple of database servers, a few Visual Studio solutions for the various products I work on, and a handful of testing tools I'm easily pushing 12GB ram or more.

Are these low-end machines being used as hobbyist or frontend-only web development? I can't think of any other explanation.

To answer the original question: Thinkpad X220. i7. Maxed out RAM. It's no portable workstation but I can push it just as hard without worrying about it overheating or failing.

[obstacle1]

>I can't think of any other explanation

Many people have their dev environments sitting on remote hardware and ssh in. Terminal sessions or an IDE aren't that resource-intensive, and that's all you need.

[Ologn]

Yes. My laptop is not on the lowest end of the scale, but over the past week my IDE has alternated between vi and emacs on my VPS as I edit Python scripts. I don't need a lot of local power to do that - years ago I was doing that type of thing from VT100 terminals.

[b_t_s]

You don't even have to offload the processing to a server unless you're working with a compiled language. Python/ruby/node/any other interpreted language plus PostgreSQL, plus a text editor like atom, plus a couple browser tabs should all run together just fine on a chomebook. I was comfortable running a setup like that 5 years ago a single core 1.6ghz atom netbook. Nowadays my cell phone probably has enough raw horsepower to run all that, compatibility issues aside.