It runs fine for me on an old ThinkPad X220 loaded with 8 GB, an i5 and a barely working SATA SSD. This is on Fedora and Claude Code is installed from Anthropic's dnf repo (the latest channel). Granted I'm on the Pro Plan and I'm not running lots of sub agents but the default terminal app from KDE (Konsole) renders and keeps Claude Code responsive enough.

I must be honestly missing some key piece of workflow otherwise I don't know why it would run so slow for other people on better hardware? Granted I'm taking care to tell Claude to not exhaust CPU cores and make sure to not trigger OOM errors, akin to "make no mistakes pls".