I'm a full stack developer, I have been using windows all my life but I purchased a new laptop recently, it has only 4gigs of RAM and I will upgrade it in the future but that's gonna take a while but mean while its running windows and its a pain in the ass! Memory is always almost full, disk(HDD 5400rpm) usage is 100% when I don't expect it to be. Chrome and VSCode hogs my memory and the laptop lags like crazy because of that webstorm and pycharm are all out of the question. I'd like to switch to a Linux distro, dual boot it since my windows is a genuine copy. Which Linux distro would be the best for me?

If you like user friendliness, there’s Linux Mint.

Ubuntu has a large user base and is still user friendly

I know some people like Fedora, but never tried it.

And finally, if you want to be a power user and config everything, Arch Linux is the King, but is not the most user friendly out there (basic installation without visual installer (highly suggest to use one if you don’t want to spend 1h installing the thing) only provides you with a terminal and you need to install the desktop environment(again, highly suggest a visual installer).
I talk a lot about it because it’s what I use, but I wouldn’t suggest it for starting with Linux (It’s what I did and 🤯)

Edit: Because you are coming from Windows, I really suggest Mint.

Linux will not save you from underpowered hardware, but it will offer more updated low ram software.

I highly suggest you to take a look at sublime or vim instead of visual code. As much as i love electron i would not suggest you too have too many instances of it running when RAM is in shortage. For browsers you need to decide wither you use multiple tabs at once or just a few (1-10) chrome has lower usage of ram for those wile firefox has a fix ram usage depending on the website in focus

@Hammster this is my config,
i5 7200u
4gb ddr4
1tb HDD 5400rpm
1080p IPS

I haven't tried vim but I did use sublime for a while but the UI wasn't as friendly as vscode.

So should I stay with windows itself? Will switching to Linux give me a boost?

I'm planning an upgrade for the RAM and an additional ssd and move the os there.

@RedBorg , I'll try Linux mint and Ubuntu.

@diavel you should try linux since it is a solid skill to learn. Also some linux distributions like debian or arch run well on low end laptops and help you save up battery life.

@Hammster , installed Linux mint just now, lemme see how that goes.

@RedBorg what's the usual memory usage of Arch btw? With a light de like i3 for example. On void I'm running on 150MB fully booted with a few terminals open. How's that on Arch? I was using Arch but switched to void a month or so ago and can't look that up rn

@diavel void is lightweight as fuck and not as difficult to install as Arch, but still has got the functionality and can be co figures as much as Arch. AND I think there are actually binaries already containing a de so you don't have to deal with more.

@b3b3 I didn’t really checked that out, but it really depends on what you install on Arch, blank Arch takes almost no memory, but a terminal ain’t very useful.
You could probably find the most lightweights graphic drivers and desktop environment and all that stuff, but I don’t know if it would beat void

@RedBorg I was asking about i3 but doesn't matter anyways. I'll stay with void for the next few months hopefully 🙃