My 5-year-old laptop is an i5/8GB with Fedora/GNOME (my primary machine is a desktop) and that is usually ok, but there are certainly things I can't do (like use Google Earth while having slack or a web browser open).

You won't but I think some HN people have to push around a lot data and the fastest way to do that is to get as much of it in memory as possible. Others love their electron apps and docker suites and VMs.