[potamic]

People were probably doing enterprise java development on those very laptops in 2011 just fine. Not much has changed with respect to toolchain since then. You should be fine. You will want to go frugal on software installations to conserve memory. I would do a fresh install of linux, disable all non-essential plugins on intellij or heck, even install an older version from 2011, and disable multi-process mode on firefox. If possible, get 32-bit versions of softwares to conserve more memory.

You gotta do with what you gotta do. I'm not sure where you are from, but people in third world go through education with much lesser. And in other fields where hardware can be super expensive or inaccessible. Making smart use of what resources are available is very much an integral part of learning.

[httpsterio]

I got the same laptop back in 2016 from a friend and I can't say that I agree. It's unbearably slow. I ran Ubuntu and a CLI most of the time with a browser and that was the absolute max you could do with it before locking totally up.

A decade is a really long time for a laptop of you plan on run anything modern on it. I assume you'll have to because id you're developing with older Java versions and SDKs you're just leaving youeswlf open for a world of hurt.

[potamic]

Stock Ubuntu desktop is pretty resource intensive with a lot of graphical effects that will struggle on older machines. There are plenty of lightweight distros out there that cut down such bloat and run easily with 4G of memory.

[zealsham]

This is my current machine and I run mint on it . It’s unbearably slow and would reboot if you do cpu intensive task like running chrome , burp suite and something else