I used an 8gb RPI4 as my main dev computer for a bit. The idea was that if I was wasting cycles it would become a lot more apparent earlier on using the RPI 4 than on my main desktop. Also because I had less stuff on the PI (No steam/games) I had less things to get distracted about. YouTube can play 1080p but because of the slowness consuming video after video is not a smooth experience which stopped me from binging content and not doing what I need to do.

Overall the experiment was positive. The reason I stopped was because I ran into issues getting certain libraries to work correctly on the RPI 4 and it was getting more annoying to solve that than doing my actual work. I did a similar experiment with an RPI3 and while it is definitely slower than the RPI4 the issue was not the speed so much as the RAM. Having Emacs, a pdf manual open, the OS in the background, and the software I was working on running started getting me dangerously close to the 1Gb limit, and I had certain compilations outright fail because of that. I think 2gb definitely gives you the minimum amount of head room to make an RPI4 a viable option. The other bottleneck is the SD card. I think a 4gb RPI4 with a slight overclock, and SSD is would probably the sweet spot for this type of exercise.